I revisited an old ambient guitar piece I did in 2011 recently and decided it had potential to go on the collection of ambient tunes I want to release this summer, but it would benefit from some editing to get rid of excessive noodling, and some improvements in mixing and production since I’ve got better mix tools now than I did in 2011.
I ended up not keeping any of the old tracks and completely rerecording all the parts over this weekend since it’s a 4 day weekend for me. I recorded the parts over two days.
It gave me a chance to use some studio tools I didn’t have back in 2011 - my Strymon Timmeline delay pedal, my Morpheus Capo and Bomber pedals, my Digitech Luxe pedal, my Electro Harmonx Super Ego pedal, the Waves Abbey Road Chambers reverb, the Eventide Black Hole reverb (the Black Hole has been invaluable in creating ambient pieces since I got it), the Exponential Audio R2 reverb, and Waves SSL and TG12345 channel strips and NLS mixing console emulation plugins.
I’m a big fan of artists like Steve Roach and Brian Eno, who use synths for a lot of their music. But I am a guitarist, so I used guitars, except for the synth that comes in about halfway through the piece, which is the PPG2.V.
very nice sounds ,i love the sound of a guitar swelling ,you have done it to great effect creating an ambient mood and the synth bass on the top sounds wonderfully alone and isolated ,gives me the chills ,well done.
Thanks for the input! The level on the guitar doing the single note ad libs is a tricky one. I tried it up a little louder, didn’t like it and turned it down.
I did take out a little bit of 400 Hz because I thought it was just a little loose or muddy in the low mids.
Perhaps I could have set the tone controls on the amp a little differently when I recorded the part, but it’s pretty close to what I was going for.
Know what? Now I’m thinking I’ll try another take of that guitar part. I did another song a couple of years ago with that same guitar, same smoky jazzy tone dialed in, but through a different amp, and I got slightly better definition. No guarantee I’ll have the controls on the amp dialed in the same as on that other song but I’ll try a take. I won’t get to it for another day or two.
Well, I listened to it again, and I really liked it again. So I just want to say, wonderful recording. Things like this are very subjective and hard to regulate. I’m wondering what was in my food that night.
I just uploaded and updated mix. I redid the single note melody guitar using another amp that I’ve used before to record this sound. It has a little more high end, but it’s not bad, and it’s a little tighter in the low mids, which I think it needed. I left all the mix EQ flat.
This kind of music is actually not that easy to improvise to. It’s easy to overplay. But I wanted to try something like “The Other Side”, a track from Steve Roach’s Dreamtime Return album, where Roach plays sustained chords on synth and Kevin Breheny improvised over them on a wind instrument synth controller. That song was apparently recorded live and the improvisation always sounded very tasteful.
I’m thinking about releasing an alternate version of this song without the improvisation. I can hear that working as well.
Nice to meet another ambient fan . You’re probably familiar with the ambient music of Hammock , your guitar sound reminds me of this. Like the sound and mix very much. You might try and go a little further even in the use of delay’s. Almost drown in it.
The synth bass could sound even more like a drone .
Chihei Hatakeyama / Philip Wilkerson are very inspirational in this area.
Thanks! I am a big fan of Hammock, and certain sounds on some of my instrumental songs are inspired by them.
I’m playing a little Chihei Hatakeyama now. I’d never heard of him before. The sounds are indeed drowning in delay and reverb. Very dreamlike. Thanks for the heads up on these artists. Today there are so many creative people doing ambient music, I can’t keep up. I have a bunch in my likes on soundcloud, which I added as I came across their music.
The original version of this song had a synth doing the bass, but as I mentioned, I’ve got better effects and mix tools now than in I did in 2011. What I tried on this song and one other that just got released is putting a bass guitar through my Electro Harmonix Super Ego pedal, which will take the note and keep playing it for as long as I want. When I mixed the track I ran the bass track through the Waves Maserati Bass plugin, which has a few presets that have doubling, so you get a sound more like a synth with a couple of detuned oscillators.
. You’re probably familiar with the ambient music of Hammock , your guitar sound reminds me of this. Like the sound and mix very much. You might try and go a little further even in the use of delay’s. Almost drown in it.