Building an ambient track in Equator2
Explore ambient music with Equator2 and use "isolation prompts" to experiment with effects and layers in your tracks.
Building an ambient track in Equator2
For those of us drawn to the immersive sounds of ambient music and inspired by the likes of Brian Eno, Max Richter and BURIAL, it can be a challenge to start making an ambient track of our own.
To help you better understand how to approach making ambient music, this article will guide you through an exercise which we’ll call an “isolation prompt”, meaning to write an entire track with one instrument. This can be a useful writing exercise to flex your creative muscles and help generate musical ideas, especially when used in practice with an instrument like Seaboard RISE 2 and software like Equator2 to unlock new vaults of creativity.
In the past, we’ve released an article helping RISE 2 players get the most out of Equator2. This provides a basic understanding of how these instruments work together, primarily by experimenting with the hundreds of sounds available. Once a sound is selected, the 5 Dimensions of Touch and the broad range of effects can be leveraged as little or as much as you’d like to craft your sound.
While specific to ROLI software instruments, this “isolation prompt” exercise can apply to any physical or software instrument you’d like to feature. If you’re eager to explore different approaches in composition, form and timbres to lay a fresh bed of ambient goodness for your listeners to fall into, stick around.
The benefits of isolation writing prompts
Isolation writing prompts are a great way to gain a masterful understanding of the breadth of timbres, expression and dynamics in whichever instrument you’re writing with. It is also a very intimate way to engage with an instrument. How can you shape the voice of your instrument in different ways to create a complete and compelling track?
With these prompts, you don’t need to release the track you make, but it can be a great starting point in helping you discover your go-to patches and learn to use an instrument in more creative ways. Take this as purely an exercise in experimentation, and you can always go back to add other instruments later. Don’t give up too quickly – perhaps assign yourself a required length, number of tracks, or range of octaves to represent.
In our practice we used traditional MIDI and MPE sounds with Seaboard RISE 2. The portable Seaboard BLOCK M would allow for a similar writing experience with fewer keywaves and without a semitone legato feature. All sounds were generated through ROLI software, primarily Equator2 and Cypher2. Some sounds were pulled into ROLI Studio Player to use extra processing methods for added fun.
An extra challenge for prompts: limiting your effects
Want to get better at sidechaining? Reverse reverb or any kind of psychoacoustic phenomena? This exercise is one way to do that in a low-risk, fun, and productive way.
For some, limiting your production to specific types of modulation and effecting might make for even more growth as a musician. One example would be a song with a trumpet as your source, but only using EQ, delay, and flanger effects. If you feel eager to take on this challenge, we’d encourage you to think about effects you rarely use or don’t fully understand how to use.
The form of ambient music
The form of your ambient piece is an important thing to consider. How long will the track be and how dense? How rhythmic or arrhythmic of a space will you create? Ambient music takes many shapes but often relies on intense textures, field recordings, and prolonged sustain of chords or single notes. This means you might not nod your head to it, or engage with it the same way as other genres.
While every track technically has a BPM set within the DAW it was created in, it might not be clear to the listener what that BPM is. However, it is not a rule of the genre to mask the BPM, in the same way that masking your samples is considered best practice. This isn’t always a decision you’ll consciously make, but something that intuitively takes shape as you develop the first sections.
Being intentional about the key and mode you use is also important. Modes have a massive impact on the emotions you can evoke through music, and as ambient producer Past Palms shared, ambient music is "all about expanding upon feelings, and often one singular feeling. It’s about expressing something intensely deep in a comparably short time."
First ideas
Like anything creative, it just takes one idea to snowball into a project. In the case of ambient music, this spark can come from the most simple of ideas. This might be a progression or melody, or even just playing one specific chord. However, starting an ambient piece can be even more stripped down than that. Since the genre emphasizes textures, just using a preset or a field recording could provide your initial inspiration.
Our track began similarly – after some playing around, we discovered an intriguing preset called the BA Submotion Formanter 5D. This was accessed and further processed through ROLI Studio Player to experiment with additional effects.
To counteract the droning nature of the preset and create a bit of rhythm, sustained chords were played through the Multi-Layer Arpeggiator at the settings below. While incredibly simple, it was all we needed to get started.
Experiments in layering
Rose Rutledge, a producer of magnificent "flutescapes" outside of her jazz projects, shared that from the first idea, she'll loop it in arrangement view for far longer than the track will be. From there, she tracks countless takes with different instrumentation, just as many of us might compose with a loop pedal, before eventually moving to cutting and arranging.
This is a method that might work for you, but try not to be too influenced by the initial sonic idea. Playing with the tempo and key can help avoid bias and distractions in bringing forth new ideas within the framework of the budding song. It doesn't always work, but the moments of playing back two independently written lines that can interact with one another in interesting ways are well worth the misses.
Going back to our track, it became obvious with this starting point that we would create a song that was at least somewhat rhythmic. Even with a low volume, a voice like the Submotion Formanter helped drive home the tempo. We then leaned on particularly resonant presets like pads and bells to formulate the long-breathed meditation you’ll hear below. These presets included Reflections of Past Dreams, Ice Glass Pad, and a sample of neighborhood church bells. This was the most modulation taken on by far, with many other presets standing as designed.
Finally came the Analog Block preset, a joyously strange setting when playing highly staccato patterns peppered throughout the piece. After all this and some arranging, the following piece came to life.
For some layering inspiration, electronic music artist and producer TAETRO has an incredible talent for layering instruments that build into extremely emotive passages in his own ambient music creation. Watch as he performs with Seaboard RISE 2 using Equator2 below.
Exploring Sounds in Equator2
There is no hard and fast rule for creating ambient music, and with this practice we're aiming to engage our creative brains in new ways to help us get past that sometimes difficult starting point. Another way to do this is through immersing yourself in different sounds and finding inspiration that way. With Equator2, you're spoilt for choice with the array of presets that can form the sonic bed for your next ambient piece.
Check out our Ambient Darklight: Preset performance below to see what Equator2 can do for your productions.
Knowing when to stop
The piece shared in this article is in its early stages. While it’s not possible to say what will become of this idea, it was important to know when to stop adding. Especially in ambient, the famous quote by Claude Debussy lives true – "music is the space between the notes."
As you spend more time writing, you’ll likely develop plenty of ideas with potential that just don’t fit with the exact project. This is especially true with the clip-focused views of Ableton Live or BitWig Studio. The latter is a rare DAW available rent-to-own option via Splice. Resisting the temptation to make every good idea work in the same project is one of the most difficult hurdles to overcome. This is one of the main ways that unfinished projects remain so.
So in the case of this piece, it was decided to stop despite there being more to show you. We hope that you like the spaces left behind and try the same in your exercise.
Next Steps
We decided to predominantly use factory settings of all presets in this track to showcase the range of sounds you can express yourself through right out of the box, without needing to be an expert sound designer. Although, analyzing and reverse-engineering the presets you like is a great way to learn about sound design. We highlight this in an earlier article.
Next comes mixing and mastering. There are many ways to approach this – if you follow an isolation prompt, this is the moment when you can either decide to keep a piece as-is, celebrating its simplicity in approach, or kick off a broader track with further plugins, audio tracks, and more.
The following plugins can be a great starting if you’re looking to expand your plugin library:
Vinyl Crackle (there are many kinds, including one FREE from iZotope)
Often enough, built-in plugins or modulation options within one like Equator2 are plenty. Sometimes it’s best to experiment and master your tracks with the plugins you have first. From there, you can identify what types of effects processing you’re missing for your sound and bring your ambient track to life with your unique finishing touch.
Written by Matt Brooks
About the author
Matt Brooks is an event producer, musician and poet based in Berlin. The grandson of jazz musicians in 1940s Chicago, music was ever-present, permeating the fondest of memories that would shape his life and career.
