did I hear someone say "ambient?"

sharke
Just wondering how one goes about making music like this.

Do you really want to know?

slartabartfast
 
Try doing that with your tuba.

This guy creates pretty nice "ambient" music from his trombone:-
 
https://soundcloud.com/quiethorn
 
 

I hear Bapu wants to start a new subgenre called Am-bient.

I hear plain old midi notes can be very ambient when played without any synths attached.

sharke
...
Trouble is if it's too interesting or thoughtful then your mind latches onto it and you can't get to sleep. I really think the whole point of this "Ambient sleeping pill" music is to make something that's as innocuous and boring as possible. 

Not sure I agree. When listening to these things, from those days that most folks ignored, the one thing that you will notice immediately, is that your technical acumen for the music will immediately say ... ohhh, that's easy ... but that stuff was done in the 70's without ANY digital anything, and your ability to dissect it, is one of the reasons why you do not enjoy it ... to you, just the flipping of a button, or the turning of a knob, does not music make ... and yet, Cluster, Harmonia, Kraftwerk and Neu made a whole living off it ... which to your ear is so simplistic and stupid that you wonder ... how did someone get away from making an album?  Answer is ... your question is 40 years late!
 
There is no sleeping pill. There only is your attention to detail ... but everyone will consider Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dreams early albums (except Electronic Meditation!), a bunch of mish mash and sleeping pill music ... and I'm not sure it is at all, when compared to stuff that was done 25 years later and sold at "New Age" stores, that never heard music, and were only looking for pacifier's for their shipdippy marriages!
 
Stop looking at the stuff as sleeping pill ... just take a look at it from your technical/musical perspective and then see what they did, and you will be able to find something similar to it, within yourself ... with one problem ... you are so steeped in the speed of the coffee and today's top ten styles of music and rock song, that your ability to let go of a "format" and simply hear music for its freedom, is just not something that you can do at this time ... let's just say you have to de-construct ... what you have constructed!
 

FWIW, I can fall asleep listening to Meshuggah...

synkrotron
FWIW, I can fall asleep listening to Meshuggah...

Heck, I do that for half the metal bands, and the growl voiced folks that think it is cool to do so with heavy metal! They even sound to me like Black Sabbath on a bad day in a bad bar in 1969! And Ozzie with a cold!
 
Oh, btw, BS was better!

Moshkito
 
Oh, btw, BS was better!

I'd have said "different." I mean, yeah, some of the early stuff that BS put out still puts a shiver up my spine but, for certain moods, I still quite like Meshuggah and, I'll be honest, I really didn't think I would... Not as if you can sing along to their stuff...

Moshkito

sharke
...
Trouble is if it's too interesting or thoughtful then your mind latches onto it and you can't get to sleep. I really think the whole point of this "Ambient sleeping pill" music is to make something that's as innocuous and boring as possible. 

Not sure I agree. When listening to these things, from those days that most folks ignored, the one thing that you will notice immediately, is that your technical acumen for the music will immediately say ... ohhh, that's easy ... but that stuff was done in the 70's without ANY digital anything, and your ability to dissect it, is one of the reasons why you do not enjoy it ... to you, just the flipping of a button, or the turning of a knob, does not music make ... and yet, Cluster, Harmonia, Kraftwerk and Neu made a whole living off it ... which to your ear is so simplistic and stupid that you wonder ... how did someone get away from making an album?  Answer is ... your question is 40 years late!
 
There is no sleeping pill. There only is your attention to detail ... but everyone will consider Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dreams early albums (except Electronic Meditation!), a bunch of mish mash and sleeping pill music ... and I'm not sure it is at all, when compared to stuff that was done 25 years later and sold at "New Age" stores, that never heard music, and were only looking for pacifier's for their shipdippy marriages!
 
Stop looking at the stuff as sleeping pill ... just take a look at it from your technical/musical perspective and then see what they did, and you will be able to find something similar to it, within yourself ... with one problem ... you are so steeped in the speed of the coffee and today's top ten styles of music and rock song, that your ability to let go of a "format" and simply hear music for its freedom, is just not something that you can do at this time ... let's just say you have to de-construct ... what you have constructed!
 

 
Pedro. Stop misinterpreting and misrepresenting people's words as a platform for one of your cliched diatribes about how other people's taste in music is blinkered and narrow  You've been flogging that dead horse for years on this forum. I made a remark about a very particular type of music that I had listened to, and none of it bore the slightest resemblance to any of the artists you mention - Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk et al. There is nothing remotely "Kraftwerk" about the ambient sleep-aid music in the playlist that I'd listened to on Spotify. Therefore it's absolutely ludicrous (and intellectually dishonest) to claim that my criticism of that music would extrapolate into a disrespect for all kinds of synthesized (or even ambient) music. 
 

..to you, just the flipping of a button, or the turning of a knob, does not music make

 
Oh really? And what qualifies you to say that? Almost all of my current musical endeavors these days involves the flipping of buttons, the turning of knobs, and I've been listening to synthesized music almost my entire life.