sharke
Just wondering how one goes about making music like this. Is there any method to it at all short of drawing out some 10 minute long notes in the piano roll? I keep trying to picture the person working on the track. Were they stopping and listening to it over and over to map out its progress, or do they literally just draw some MIDI notes, listen to it all the way through to check for anything obviously out of place, export it and call it a day? Seems like you could bang a few of these out a day, put them in a playlist on Spotify and rake in a few dollars from people like me playing them on repeat for 7 hours at a time.
I've done some ambient stuff in my day. To try to answer what you're asking, I'll simply reframe your question a bit with a somewhat different hypothetical.
So the speed metal stuff. I'm just wondering how one goes about making music like this. Do you just set all the distortion knobs to max, pick a key, and then play as many notes as you can as quickly as you can with no regard for melody or groove or feel what so ever? Seems like you could bang a few of these out a day, put them in a playlist on Spotify and rake in a few dollars from people like me playing them on repeat for 7 hours at a time.
Ok I know that seems like I'm just knocking speed metal. But I'm not. I'm making a point. The answer in both cases is pretty much the same. In all cases actually, no matter what genre you're talking about it.
No matter what genre, if you don't much care for it and don't really listen to it all that much, it will sound more or less like a random string of notes with no rhyme or reason as to how anyone could have come up with such a thing nor any idea how they could remember it long enough to play it the same way twice in a row. This applies even if you happen to hear something in that genre that you kind of like assuming you've heard it only once.
To understand how it is that someone could create a style of music you don't normally listen to, you have to live in it for a while. Immerse yourself in it and spend lots of quality time really listening to it. Then and only then will you begin discover the real nuances that both define the genre and separate the high quality examples of the genre from the low quality examples. This applies whether we're talking about speed metal, reggae, bebop, skiffle or yes, even ambient.
So to actually answer your question, yes there's a method to making it. No you don't just just draw some MIDI notes, listen to it all the way through to check for anything obviously out of place, export it and call it a day? At least they don't if they care about what they're doing and want it to be a quality example of the genre.
Ambient is about texture and the art of subtle development. Its supposed to be a kind of sonic wallpaper that serves as a background for other things. Its not supposed to demand your full attention the way most other types of music do. But at the same time, you don't want to just hold an envelope sweep pad for 16 bars and repeat it for 6 minutes with no development at all because even as background wallpaper, that much repetition with no development becomes distracting.
In a way, its no different that lots of other genres in that its pretty easy to fake and do something that 'sounds like it' but much more difficult to do something that actually is a quality example of the art.