Sound Design - Quick tip : Ambient textures

[ARiFF]

Sound Design - Quick tip : Ambient textures

I have been working with sound textures and ambient samples for quite a while now, and since we had the sound design theory thread, I figured I might as well share some personal one’s as I get asked questions about this quite often. Usually, these tips & guides dont tell you the exact deal on how they all managed to get it working, but since i'm all for sharing knowledge, i'll try to explain this one as we go along a little example... Mind you this is not a step-by-step guide at all, its probably a bit chaotic and such, the main purpose is that you understand what i’ve been doing. Let’s go

The final result :



Choose your samples wisely…

So I grabbed a few samples from http://www.freesound.org website, you can get some from there as well or use your own library. For this example I took a whispering sample, some nature sounds from the forest and a male vocal sample… Most of the time I just pick a few which I like so I have some basic harmonics to work with.

Something worth mentioning is I try to look for samples with a pretty large frequency range, this gives us more options later on when we start filtering our layers to make the individual sounds into a cohesive matter.

Sample 1 :
Sample 2 :
Sample 3 :

Usually for ambience and textures, I use layering to get a basic result, afterwards I’ll start processing the individual layers to end up with a main texture. Since textures don’t have to have a specific distinctive recognisable sound and can be quite blurry, layering is probably the easiest technique.
I try to keep in mind what type of ambience I’m going for, whether it is a techno theme, industrial, and so on would influence the way I will select my source material and process the sound afterwards.

Le secret weapon

One of my best kept secret weapons when doing textures is a small application which listens to the name Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch. The title says extreme, and to be honest that’s the least you could say. This awesome application can stretch sounds from 1 second to 10.000x its length or using Hyper stretch it can do 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 times (10^18). That’s long!

I wouldn’t advise it though since it takes ages to write a wav file which can play for 65 years or longer. Trust me I tried it This neat tool can be found @ http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/

PESS_00.png (51.63 KiB) Viewed 3461 times

There's a lot of extra cool stuff you can do with it harmonics wise and so on but I’ll leave that for you to discover. To continue my little experiment, what I did is take my 3 samples and stretched them quite a bit ( up to 10x ) I think it was, than write them back to a folder on the HD so we have 3 x the original & 3x the stretched samples. Next I go back to my DAW ( Ableton in my case ) and have a look at the raw waveforms. If you end up with samples which take 30 minutes or more, cut off the excess data in the beginning, this makes handling the files a bit easier.

PESS_01.png (84.31 KiB) Viewed 3460 times

Stretch that !

The Stretch slider well stretches the sound as far as you want it to go. Be prepared for enormously long .wav files and slow saving times though. If you keep your files at 2-3 minutes stretched, you’ll have a nice effect, and still keeps it all workable. The Mode dropdown list is where you can hyper stretch or shorten your loaded file. I nearly only use the Stretch mode,from my experience, stretching audio up to a max time of 3 mines is more than enough to give a decent result.

Processing the process

PESS_02.png (93.34 KiB) Viewed 3462 times

The process tab is pretty straight forward. For this sample I enabled the octave mixer. This enables pitch shifting of my raw stretched sound. You can see it as an “octave mixer”, so -2 & -1 are 2 octaves below the main sample. Since this one was fairly dense in high frequencies, I added some extra bass with the -2 and -1 channels.

Spread increases the bandwidth of each harmonic.

The tonal / noise option enables you to change the balance between the noise and tonal elements of my sample.

Compress is just a super basic compressor, only there to straighten out some of the volume issues the stretching might have undergone, and gives us a nicer overall loudness. On the lower left side you can see a play button and stop.

If you change an option make sure to double click on stop first, wait a second and then start playing.

When I’m done, I go to the “write file” tab to bounce my new sample to the HD. I’m ready with the stretching so I can close this one and move into Ableton.

Sample 1 :
Sample 2 :
Sample 3 :

ABL_07.png (38.62 KiB) Viewed 3460 times

Ableton Live

In Ableton I start a new session and will only use this to create my instrument rack with my new samples. They get all triggered by a single midi clip. The mixer channel is a group of audio busses which I use a lot, they’re not used in this example so you can ignore them.

ABL_01.png (67.88 KiB) Viewed 3460 times

So, I’ve created a midi track, and 2 audio tracks. The midi track is just a simple rack, this will serve as our layered instrument for our final texture. Sources is an audio track, with my stretched audio samples loaded, and the resampler, well you probably can figure that one out yourself

I start working on the sources track, and do some basic processing on each sample. Most of the time this is an EQ, maybe some saturation or a tube… You could do this in the layered instrument as well, but I like to bounce my EQ cuts to audio, and import those back into the instrument. Another thing I do is setting up loops here, later I will bounce them as one shots, but when they get imported into the instrument rack, setting up the loops again will give me a smoother effect.

I have a basic toolset which I tend to use most of the time. An EQ8, Simple Delay, Compressor, Voxengo Span…
I start this over from scratch on each loaded source sample. This is quite important, because you don’t want to cut away the LF of all your samples.

Something worth mentioning is I’ll keep an ear open for a sample which will serve as my bass texture, hence cutting down the HF from it. I’ll find something which will suit for the mids, and off course a sample which will serve as my HF layer.

ABL_02.png (45.88 KiB) Viewed 3460 times

Once done, I resample my processed source samples, and import them back into Ableton.
I can start layering my new samples into a midi instrument rack. I’ll keep an eye out for looping and usually set out faded looping points, so we have seamless repeating. Make them long enough, so the listener will nearly hear its repeating over and over. In the screens below you can clearly see some of the settings I changed for every layer. I added another compressor on the main audio out part, this keeps everything tight and glued together.

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Most of you might be aware of this, but it’s possible to make sustaining midi loops through the actual boundaries of the loop itself. Just make a midi clip, draw in some notes and extend them outside the boundaries, move the start point over and off you go. Seamless repeating of midi notes, without continuously triggering it.

ABL_06.png (45.88 KiB) Viewed 3460 times

All we need to do now, is find some nice notes / chords to play and for example dump these into session view. Extend them the way you want and voila : we have an ambient texture, which loops seamingless and is unique

For the people who like : here is the final texture I ended up with, sounds pretty decent imo, kinda horrorish.

I hope you’ve maybe learnt something with this short guide. If you experiment around feel free to post your results as a reply.

Good luck, and a lot of fun
ARiFF

[Críoch]

Wow - Mega post Klaas! Thanks a lot.

I'm gonna go though this a bit more. Excellent result!

[chocstclair85]

Thanks very much for this, some very helpful info!!!!

[Mono-xID]

thanks for this very informative post,sir.....appreciated

[chrisso]

Nice informative post.
I've heard about Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch before. It seems extremely powerful.
However, a few months ago I followed a lengthy trail to try and download this app for Mac and install it. Totally failed on every level.
I'm just not a computer-head, and/or this is just not that intuitive for Mac users.

[ARiFF]

Nice informative post.
I've heard about Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch before. It seems extremely powerful.
However, a few months ago I followed a lengthy trail to try and download this app for Mac and install it. Totally failed on every level.
I'm just not a computer-head, and/or this is just not that intuitive for Mac users.

the interface is quite messy thats for sure chrisso. The UI could use a much needed restyling / overhaul kinda thing, but as you said its quite powerful. I've been using it for a year or 2 i think now, and had some great results. You have to see this as another tool in the audio toolbox though, but for creating pads / textures and so on it works great.

[Mslwte]

Klaas this is a great post! I have this stretch app but don't really use it much now days. I used together mixed results, I look forward to following your tips tomorrow!

[Críoch]

Nice informative post.
I've heard about Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch before. It seems extremely powerful.
However, a few months ago I followed a lengthy trail to try and download this app for Mac and install it. Totally failed on every level.
I'm just not a computer-head, and/or this is just not that intuitive for Mac users.

Same here Mate.. it didnt work for me at all. Did you get it working?

PC - 100% works. Mac - forget it

[ste]

nice thread! good to share this kind of personal approaches. not for others to copy but as input for force people to work in creative ways!! greeeeat

[Lost to the Void]

Paulstretch, oldest trick in the book.

But a goodie.

[chrisso]

Same here Mate.. it didnt work for me at all. Did you get it working?

I couldn't even get it to install. Although I've seen a Mac guy using it (on Youtube).

[Mattias]

Good tips & tricks.
Paulstretch is a classic

[bram2000]

I've used it ok on my Mac (10.7), I think I used the version from here:

http://music.cornwarning.com/2011/12/07 ... s-x-build/

The user interface doesn't work properly IIRC (I think the transport buttons are visually broken for one), but you can still use it.

[ARiFF]

I've used it ok on my Mac (10.7), I think I used the version from here:

http://music.cornwarning.com/2011/12/07 ... s-x-build/

The user interface doesn't work properly IIRC (I think the transport buttons are visually broken for one), but you can still use it.

yep it acts funny, just need to double click the stop button instead of single clicking, than it should work fine.

[Johnlad]

Yeah, this is a great post. I managed to get the one posted by Bram working on my mac a bit ago but its pretty buggy. Shame really because it seems a great tool.

[Críoch]

I have to try it again on my mac so..

[arc]

Thanks for taking the time to share this. This would work really well for an ambient intro type track.

[Hades]

I've used it ok on my Mac (10.7), I think I used the version from here:

http://music.cornwarning.com/2011/12/07 ... s-x-build/

The user interface doesn't work properly IIRC (I think the transport buttons are visually broken for one), but you can still use it.

yep it acts funny, just need to double click the stop button instead of single clicking, than it should work fine.

do you use it on a mac ?

cause I remember giving this a try a few years ago when a friend of mine suggested it since I was intrigued on how people like The Caretaker made tracks like this one :

youtu.be/xr9UnAFFLCA


he used old ballroom records and slowed them way down to make that album (Stairway To The Stars), but I wanted to know how he got the audio so slowed down.
Anyways, I gave the thing a try with slowing stuff down and stretching it within Ableton itself, and actually got pretty nice results.
Obviously they weren't as good as what you'd get with Paul's stretch, but I still got a nice fucked up dark ambient track out of this song :

youtu.be/apEilrBrBKw


Anyways, I didn't have Paulstretch back then, so when my friend suggested this, I was like "oowiieee !"
But I never got it to work at all, so if anyone has a version that does work on mac, that'd be great cause then I'd be "oowiieee ! " all over again !!

[ARiFF]

i didnt test it on a Mac Hades, im a Windhoos user unfortunately. Guess im lucky for once \o/

Did you get my mail btw ?