JWM - The Rush of Stillness (Lighter Semi-Melodic Ambient)

jwmmakerofmusic

At long last, something inspired me to create Ambient! It was @Hainbach 's latest video about Textures Telling a Story! Really fucking fascinating, and watching him playing with the Lyra got me to open up Mononoke and record something into Gauss (which comes to full circle since Hainbach worked with @brambos to create such a masterpiece of a plugin!)

Anyways, I wanted to use mLFO, but the lack of custom LFO curves made me go back to Flux Pro for the time being. (I did write the dev the feature request, and they're all for it! Even asked me if I prefer curves with draggable handles or drawing in a custom LFO! That's an amazing, responsive, friendly, wonderfully talented dev who cares about their users! I'll for sure purchase their other apps in support of them!)

The piano is mostly driven by Ioniarics until the very last minute and a half or so where I improvise on the on-screen keyboard!

My next foray into Ambient will definitely use mLFO as I want to have a far more generative sort of "set it and forget it" type of piece, a bit more of an installation that lasts at least 30 minutes or so!

Yes...this type of "installation" Ambient fascinates me to no end. 🤣 I never knew "As Slow As Possible" was possible, and holy shit what an amazing concept John Cage concocted! Visiting St. Burchardi is now on my bucket list. I have a few hundred more years left to go and visit.

jwmmakerofmusic

Bumping it up for comments.

Edit: Nevermind. Guess nobody has anything to say. 😒

ReneAsologuitar

Hi jwm,
Great to hear your ambient sounds again.
Slow as possible is an art.
This music is relaxing.
Rene

jwmmakerofmusic

@ReneAsologuitar said:
Hi jwm,
Great to hear your ambient sounds again.
Slow as possible is an art.
This music is relaxing.
Rene

Much love and peace to you and yours mate. Always great to hear from you. I need to catch up on the creations section of this ol' forum here and see what new covers and originals you've released the past couple of weeks. I missed out on so damn much since there are so many talented, creative folks here.

Yep, it's no secret I love "as slow as possible". John Cage is one of my big influences as well as other pioneers and innovators of this style of sonic sculpting. Thanks for having the patience to get through my 14+ minute piece. 😅

GeoTony

Listened all the way through 👍 Lighter indeed and (for me) more enjoyable than your darker works… but everybody to there own!

Svetlovska

Hiya! Late to the party as lately I have been otherwise engaged making my own stuff with one hand whilst fending off trolls with the other,soz!

This is good stuff: slow is always good, in my book, solo piano notes dropped into a well of near silence, a threatening cloud rumbling on the horizon… ooh, yeah, baby!

Glad you liked that Hainbach vid. I too found it very inspirational (in fact it’s why I went all dusty on my own latest bit.).

On the ‘installation piece’ / endless generative front, I recently surprised myself in making a very simple thing: a set of discrete wind chime samples taken from a YouTube wind chime sellers marketing pitch, where he helpfully demoed each in isolation, loaded into Koala, and triggered (very slowly, natch) by ShiftBud.

By repitching and layering short sequences of chimes with discrete hits, and letting ShiftBud randomly trigger the resulting Koala pads, I got something which would play constantly shifting patterns forever. And it really sounded great. (Well, it sounded like wind chimes, if you like wind chimes, which I do.) I used a snippet of it for my At Clouds Hill piece, but it has prompted me to think of more koala pads triggered randomly/generatively type experiments.

Now I need to get some environmental found sound in there too… to create a, y’know (forbidden word alert’ ) er… ‘soundscape’.

jwmmakerofmusic

@GeoTony said:
Listened all the way through 👍 Lighter indeed and (for me) more enjoyable than your darker works… but everybody to there own!

That's fair. Not everyone digs Dark Ambient. Right now, I seem to be in my Melodic Ambient era of production. Yes, I refer to periods of time where I'm stuck on one genre as "era". 😅

And I figured out recently how I often get stuck in creative ruts musically. It's when I'm trying to continue to produce in a genre that I love but have no creative juices left for, and I stubbornly refuse to move to a different genre or allow my creativity to evolve naturally because I'm mentally stuck on the previous genre that, while it still interests me, my creativity has no interest in. 😂

Not gonna lie - I do miss producing like David Lynch, but I know someday my creativity will wander back to that genre. For now, it's Melodic Ambient and EDM (although I'm working on pre-planning an EDM album).

And it makes me so happy that you listened all the way through. Thanks for taking the time mate. Cheers.

I will answer you @Svetlovska in my next reply.

jwmmakerofmusic

@Svetlovska said:
Hiya! Late to the party as lately I have been otherwise engaged making my own stuff with one hand whilst fending off trolls with the other,soz!

It's all good. Dealing with what you have to deal with is no picnic, that's for damn sure.

This is good stuff: slow is always good, in my book, solo piano notes dropped into a well of near silence, a threatening cloud rumbling on the horizon… ooh, yeah, baby!

😎 I want to try to get that "as slow as possible" vibe, although this time my piece still felt a bit too fast to be "as slow as possible", but I still love it as-is.

Glad you liked that Hainbach vid. I too found it very inspirational (in fact it’s why I went all dusty on my own latest bit.).

I definitely need to catch up in the Creations section. I've been sorely lacking in self-discipline recently, and I honestly don't know why. 😅

On the ‘installation piece’ / endless generative front, I recently surprised myself in making a very simple thing: a set of discrete wind chime samples taken from a YouTube wind chime sellers marketing pitch, where he helpfully demoed each in isolation, loaded into Koala, and triggered (very slowly, natch) by ShiftBud.

ShiftBud? Do I have that? One sec...okay, purchased, lol.

Using a wind chime recording and chopping into samples in Koala sounds absolutely fascinating. ❤️

By repitching and layering short sequences of chimes with discrete hits, and letting ShiftBud randomly trigger the resulting Koala pads, I got something which would play constantly shifting patterns forever. And it really sounded great. (Well, it sounded like wind chimes, if you like wind chimes, which I do.) I used a snippet of it for my At Clouds Hill piece, but it has prompted me to think of more koala pads triggered randomly/generatively type experiments.

You're definitely speaking my musical language right here.

Now I need to get some environmental found sound in there too… to create a, y’know (forbidden word alert’ ) er… ‘soundscape’.

"Forbidden word", lol. 🤣 It's funny how "fuck" isn't the number one "forbidden word" here but rather "soundscape". (It isn't a JWM post without dropping at least one f-word, innit? )

A good source of found sounds is freesound.org , and a great app if you don't have it yet is the PaulXStretch beta. TwistedWave is great for stretching audio too, but PaulXStretch has this magical quality that can take any sample and turn it into a drone.