Ambience / Atmospherics

May 31

Every record has an overall feeling. That feeling could be excitement, joy, sorrow, hope, fear, and everything in between. A great track makes us sympathetic to the feeling that the musician was expressing when they wrote it. Whenever you have a desire to express an emotion, imagine how you would put it in music. You may find that your imagination blends bits from other tracks you’ve heard in the past. If any of those memories stir up a good feeling, go find the tracks, listen to them and capture your favourite moments as audio files.

Don’t be afraid to base your track on another one. Simply copying something isn’t creative, but reinventing it is how progress works. All art is inspired by what came before it and Humanity has only got this far because of the creative efforts of previous generations. Even Sir Isaac Newton admitted that his groundbreaking scientific discoveries were built on other people’s discoveries. He is quoted to have said, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants”.

1.1 RECORD A SAMPLE

The background ambience that gives Battle Colours its haunting character is built upon the deep bass and tenor choral drones of the Latvian State Academic Choir in the BBC's version of War & Peace. This sound was sampled from the soundtrack of one of the show’s episodes.

To record a movie soundtrack, use an application called Audio Hijack. It’s a Mac OSX app that allows you to reroute your computer’s audio bus via a customisable plugin chain. One of the plugins is an audio recorder that can be used to grab a completely undistorted audio sample of the sound coming from your machine.