NOT a guitar topic - how would you approach creating this sort of ambience?

Harmony & Theory
#1

There should really be a category more focused on music production…

Anyways - I’m absolutely in love with Akhlys, and one of their signature sounds is dark ambience.
The project even started as ambient one:

And ever since they rely heavily on this sort of sounds, both on The Dreaming I:

And on Melinoe (albeit it’s not as pronounced):

In combination with heavy, distorted, shrieking tremolo picked guitars it sound so massive, it takes so much space the result is in some wicked way both threatening and dreamy.

I MUST learn the basics of how to produce such sounds.
Is it some certain plugins? Something else?
I’m really curious.

#2

Sounds like they’re using a huge hall reverb and possibly some delay or a high early reflections settiing, long decay, with the wet/dry mix all the way down. Probably high and low passing it too. I don’t know what’s triggering the reverberation, maybe a synth hit that’s heavily distorted, but it just sounds like a huge wash of reverb.

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#3

You can get sample packs for your DAW that give those sort of sounds. I use Logic and it has the EXS24 and it has premade cinematic type sounds that you can edit yourself. I’m hearing lots of reverb, but not really any delay.

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#4

Is there any place where I could get some free samples?
Also, how does it work if I wanted to place them on piano roll and have them actually in tune?

#5

I’m not sure where you can free synth samples, unfortunately. I just use the ones built into Logic. You can find lots of organic sample sounds online, like

https://freesound.org/

#6

If you are into this sort of thing a good intro piece of gear would be the arturia minibrute 2s. This is a bad little toy, you get semi modular, a sequencer, and you can add onto it later with the rackbrute to use more modules like add in a sampler with the synth. you can do some insane stuff. but it can get very pricey. if i ever come into a pot of gold i will be getting a octatrack for its sampler capabilities, but you can get more affordable sampler options. Sounds like what everyone says reverb on a stretched sample, granular synthesis. There is a module that is highly sought after that does this better than any of them, but it is always out of stock or cloned. I will try to find the name of it. sounds like frozen reverb, faded in noise, voice samples, and the ambient synth sound sometimes there is that slow rate lfo effect tacked onto the different tracks.

you might like this guys stuff. get some good headphones this stuff is so top notch, i like when he uses the dave smith tempest, imo the tempest is the highest echelon of analog drum machines. and the pandemic hit, and they discontinued i was so close to getting one. now they are gonna sky rocket in value probably.

Do you like techno synth type stuff like this set? This dude is a mastermind…

#7

To add onto @Drew 's comments on wet / dry verb: you can make a couple aux channels with different types of reverb (say one really small room / another a huge hall) and then send different levels of instruments to either channel. Things that are more “slow moving” (like a droning note) can go in the huge hall, whereas a chord progression would probably go into the small room so it doesn’t get totally washed out.

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