How to add atmosphere to a track?

zawmbee · Post by **zawmbee** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 8:15 pm

OK, I'm still a beginner and a lot of my tracks consist of drums, 1 or 2 basslines and a couple of samples. What are ways I can fill it up? I hear a lot of professional tracks with a lot going on in the back. Are those synthesizer effects?

wub · Post by **wub** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 8:19 pm

Try this - Take a sample you like. Reverse it. Drag it out so it's about 8 times it's original length. Add delay & reverb. Drop into the playlist. Sidechain to your kick.

jaydot · Post by **jaydot** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 8:28 pm

Pads. Pads. Pads. Pads.

ToxicBass · Post by **ToxicBass** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 8:45 pm

Sine waves played in a high octave with unison and experimentation with effects like chorus and flangers can yield some nice pads. You can also make a pad using a white noise oscillator with a low pass filter on it bringing the filter frequency down then raising/modulating the resonance. Process to taste like the one above.
Reverb builds atmospherics and helps to fill in the gaps, don't overdo it though.
Look into FM synthesis if your really interested in complex atmospherics, FM8 and Absynth are amazing for that sort of stuff, it's a massive learning curve though.
If you get really stuck then load up a pad and play a chord progression similar to that of your main bass rift.

Basic A · Post by **Basic A** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 9:05 pm

Tons of white noise sweeps. Like, little sweeps every other bar, average sweeps ever 4, big sweeps every 8, giant sweeps every 16. Turn it down so low its almost negligible.

Pads:

Type the key of your track into google, find a piano, a guitar, a cello, and a clarinet in that key... Open them up, sample 4 bars from each of them, doesnt have to make any sense really... Timestretch one of those 4 bars to 32, one to 16, and one to 18, reverse the one thats left... Mix that down and drench it reverbs and delays.

FuzionDubstep · Post by **FuzionDubstep** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 9:42 pm

add reverb to the master and turn it up full then add an equalizer and take out all the high ends starting at 1khz and then add some bit-crusher to it and finally add some heavy delay/echo your whole master and mix it down to 12kbps mp3 and there you go

efence · Post by **efence** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 10:00 pm

i try to imagine what is the scene of you are setting, then use pads and efx to convey that scene.
fictional example: im working on a mechstep track. im envisioning a battle in a space station like you would find in aliens.
for random effects: the sound of metal on metal, sample some sci-fi movies just random room tone stuff.lasers phasers, explosions.
pads: search presets or make some simple sci-fi sounding pads ,some balderunner sound, then layer or resample the pads layered with some of the more soundscape efx i sampled. take new resample add filter,verb,delay.
try to make your verbs match your scene: for this fictional scene i envisioned metal hallways so use one verb a verb th small dimensions but a long release.

kaiori breathe · Post by **kaiori breathe** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 10:08 pm

I was just about to make a post on this actually.

This is a really nifty little tool:

http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/

It allows you to stretch sounds you've sampled or created without completely destroying them as most time stretching tools do.

A lot of the time if I have a nice chord sequence in mind for a song I'll write it out at 560bpm in fruity loops, i'll write the same chord sequence out on a few different synths to play it together and get a really thick sound with lots of different textures, then, add in some pitch bends and choir 'ahh's moving around over it and export it and stretch the hell out of it. Then I'll run it under some clean pads playing the same chord sequence and add some reversed piano or guitar lines.

This is the same tool that was used to make that Justin Bieber (no I'm not googling how to spell his name - I don't care) atmospheric track.

You can get some cool risers by stretching kicks and snares too.

B-Frank · Post by **B-Frank** » Sun Jun 05, 2011 11:36 pm

zawmbee wrote:OK, I'm still a beginner and a lot of my tracks consist of drums, 1 or 2 basslines and a couple of samples. What are ways I can fill it up? I hear a lot of professional tracks with a lot going on in the back. Are those synthesizer effects?

Rip the audio from your favourite porno. Can't get more atmospheric than a man with a cock the size of a third leg smashing the shit out of an adult actress.

edit: if that fails, sweeps, reverberated percussion, pads and even random shiz like vinyl crackle will get you there.

hasezwei · Post by **hasezwei** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 12:11 am

am i the only one who thinks timestretching (even with paulstretch) introduces horrible artifacts?

but still everything said above applies. i personally like to use ambient field recordings, put that really low in the mix and there you go. might not even need sidechaining.

speaking of which, i feel overly sidechained amient stuff and pads are a bit overused now and in fact annoy me.

kaiori breathe · Post by **kaiori breathe** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 12:26 am

hasezwei wrote:am i the only one who thinks timestretching (even with paulstretch) introduces horrible artifacts?

That is true to be fair.

If your time stretching samples then that can be a big issue because a lot of the time the source they come from is pretty cluttered and the samples themselves are often not of a great quality and require a lot of work, but, if you program a consonant chord sequence into synths that don't have too many grating harmonics then it shouldn't be too big an issue - if it is you can always clip away the parts you don't like, eq, or filter out bits. If that fails then keep the sounds in the background as ambient fluffer to beef up pre-existing synth pads you've made. Certainly with the stuff I'm making I'd never put a heavily time stretched sound in the foreground on its own, it'd always be to beef up something else. Although with the really ambient stuff I think sometimes the artifacts are just a part of the sound, it can add to what your making rather than detracting from it. I think anyway.

hasezwei wrote:speaking of which, i feel overly sidechained amient stuff and pads are a bit overused now and in fact annoy me.

If you write for yourself and you're not trying to be original then it's not an issue. If you're writing to get played out in a club then yea, definitely a point to take on board.

ambinate · Post by **ambinate** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 1:16 am

personally, i have had a lot of trouble designing pads that don't sound like shit, hoping to start working on that soon. but sometimes i've been able to compensate by doing some of the stuff mentioned already - percussive sounds with lots of reverb, timestretching and reversing a sample, all that kind of stuff. there's a lot of other killer ideas in this thread that i can't wait to try out, though.

Sine69 · Post by **Sine69** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 2:55 am

I get pretty good results by taking the original sound, stretching it out a ton, and then reversing it. After that I use the grain delay effect (I'm using Live) and reverb with a long decay time.

Hell, I took the default patch in Massive, and did all of that. I ended up with an ominous cave-echo sounding thing

thefrim · Post by **thefrim** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 3:28 am

Basic A wrote:Tons of white noise sweeps. Like, little sweeps every other bar, average sweeps ever 4, big sweeps every 8, giant sweeps every 16. Turn it down so low its almost negligible.

YES. I love doing this except I use vengeance crash cymbals of different lengths. You wouldn't believe how much it adds to the completeness of a track while not distracting from the main elements at all

probably will get shit for using this example lol, but listen to how the looong white noise sweep right at the drop fills out the track a lot even though the other elements are so sparse

heres one of my tracks with crash cymbals n shit galore to help fill it out
Soundcloud

wub · Post by **wub** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 6:55 am

hasezwei wrote:am i the only one who thinks timestretching (even with paulstretch) introduces horrible artifacts?

Sometimes yes, sometimes now. I've found some hat samples that sound atrocious when stretched even a tiny bit, but one of the recent Sample contests had a bass sound that when stretched and reversed sounded like the noise the walkers make out of War Of The Worlds.

hasezwei wrote:but still everything said above applies. i personally like to use ambient field recordings, put that really low in the mix and there you go. might not even need sidechaining.

speaking of which, i feel overly sidechained amient stuff and pads are a bit overused now and in fact annoy me.

I agree with this to a point, but overused is a bit sweeping for my tastes - sometimes stuff works, sometimes it doesn't. Though that being said, I listened to a spate of tunes recently that sounded like bad FlyLo b-sides with the amount of pUUMpiNG siDEchAIniNG going on with ther sounds

Filthzilla · Post by **Filthzilla** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 10:57 am

I'd go with white noize everytime.

Either that or put some vinyl crackle in the background or atmosphere samples from a game like Halo or COD.

craig · Post by **craig** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 11:46 am

could always buy a decent mic and go make your own field recordings.
check the latest deepchord album for an excellent example

Cubicle · Post by **Cubicle** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 12:11 pm

I'm currently making a summertune.
Idea was to do a remix of Adele's Someone Like You but due to me not being able to warp it atm I decided to just get some piano's/flutes/violins going.

Started to make the track without the vocals and even forgot about it all untill I needed some good atmosphere.
I've chopped up the vocals (long notes) and put a massive amount of reverb on it. Then I reversed them and bam! sweet sounding long "ooooooooooooooooooooh's"

hasezwei · Post by **hasezwei** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 2:22 pm

craig wrote:could always buy a decent mic and go make your own field recordings.
check the latest deepchord album for an excellent example

i found that air vents are a great source of ambience once you've foudn the right andle and distance (make sure to hold the mic still or you'll end up with horrible phasing, completely ruined my first night of recording). you can find them pretty much everywhere in the city as well as industrial districts. rivers are always nice too.
be sure to record at night and hope no cars are gonna drive by, even if they're a few blocks away they can ruin a recording (especially buses).

summer's not a good time for field recording tho, too many birds.

-[2]DAY_- · Post by **-[2]DAY_-** » Mon Jun 06, 2011 2:36 pm

once i did my pads by vocoding the output of a "yoy"'s reverb tail, with bright trancy saw chords as the modulator.

My last track, all harmonics, melodies and diads on the bass guitar. used that Waves RBass on it and some further EQ/hi pass, sounds lush for lack of a better word.

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