Andy, you must have inspiration pumping through your veins. You are magnificent my friend - such creativity and imigination and you follow through with great talent. Love it.

Very interesting soundscape this one and those screen shots you posted make for interesting viewing. 

ruralrocker2010
This is outstanding. The only thing I would have done (but that doesn't matter because it's not my song) is build in some deep drum sounds and enhance the tension, almost like an army marching by....could be cool. Not that what you have is bad, because that's not the aim of my comment, just that I would have took the tension to the point of no return. Very nice choices in here. Is this all VST or are you using a workstation, like a Korg Kronos?

 
Thank you very much Joshua, for listening and for your kind words
 
Even though I have Battery, BFD Eco and Drumaxx, plus a few other percussion VSTi, I haven't used any of them for around 18 months now. For the odd tracks that do contain some kind of beat I have either used Tantra (a VST effect) or some kind of sample manipulation. Main reason being is that some "ambient purists" say that ambient should not have any beat aspects. That's not to say I don't think I should use beats/percussion myself, it's just me trying to "fit in," if you like. And it has been an interesting journey, I have to say.
 
Perhaps in the future I will try introducing something, like you say, "deep drum sound" in the future. After all, just because you are using percussion doesn't mean that it has to be used to create some kind of rhythm. It's just another sound source, to be used and manipulated.
 
This particular piece is all VST based instruments and effects. I do, however, have a couple of hardware synths and I recently purchased (in partnership with my eldest son) a Eurorack modular system.
 
Cheers, and thanks again,
 
andy

MarkusClinus
Andy, you must have inspiration pumping through your veins. You are magnificent my friend - such creativity and imigination and you follow through with great talent. Love it.

Thank you so much Mark
 
Yes, I suppose I do... I have always been more moved by sounds, I guess. I love songs too, but I remember, way back when I was knee high to a grass hopper, resting the bones around my ears on a frame that had a large spring attached to it and then tapping said spring and getting lost in the sounds it made. And then becoming interested in very early Tangerine Dream stuff.
 
cheers, and thanks for your support Mark, I really appreciate it
 
andy

biodiode
Very interesting soundscape this one and those screen shots you posted make for interesting viewing. 

Thanks Adrian
 
If you fancy embarking on something like this and want some pointers, please, shout up. It would be an absolute pleasure. Having said that, if you are anything like me then most of the fun is digging into this and learning for yourself.
 
But, yeah, that's one of the reasons why I posted the screen shots above. As you can see, the actual sound sources, which have been bounced to audio, run through the whole piece and I use automation to bring those sounds through into the mix, either directly or via one of the effects busses, or both.
 
Cheers, and thanks for listening,
 
andy

Another ride through deep space courtesy of our good friend, Andy. Another typically brilliant ambient piece, Andy... how do you dream this stuff up?  And thanks for sharing those screen shots.  I suspect we could all learn some interesting techniques from you.

philz
Another ride through deep space courtesy of our good friend, Andy. Another typically brilliant ambient piece, Andy... how do you dream this stuff up?  And thanks for sharing those screen shots.  I suspect we could all learn some interesting techniques from you.

Thank you very much Phil.
 
I dunno... I just put it down to lots of little happy accidents
 
I guess my techniques could well be interesting, although I can't see them being of much use to normal rock/pop songs, as such.
 
I got some of the ideas for the above when I had a go at parallel compression on a drum buss. I then started playing with all sorts of effects as parallel processing, and that then led to just letting the processed sound reach the master buss. It certainly got me into understanding what I could do with my effects units
 
cheers
 
andy