Pads, Textures, & Ambience

[buckdice]

Hey, this is my first post and first time on the site. I wanted to see if anyone knows where I can find any tutorial videos or has an tips themselves on creating modulating textures to suit a tech house track. I am having a lot of trouble creating a sort of background noise that producers like carlo lio use throughout their entire tracks in order to keep the track sounding full. But, the thing I want to learn most is how to make the modulating texture as heard in this song http://soundcloud.com/kling-klong-recor ... y-original I know he sampled this from an arman van helden track but this is the type of stuff I'm trying to re create. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Stomper]

im not gonna try and guess what he did on that specific sound because there are so many things you can do and it could be anything.

i have one word for these kind of effects.
NOODELING.

if you dont know what noodeling means, its when you take a synth and starting playing around trying stuff on the spot without thinking a head what you want or going to do.
take 2 squares or saws, change the fine tune for each and you already have some movement in the sound. lfo on filter, different pwm for each with different speeds. env on the amount of modulation on the pwm, lfo changes another lfo speed (and env changing the amount of modulation of that lfo). add a 3rd osc with fm or sync.
im just throwing stuff out of my head of course. dont know if its sounds any good. just noodle

you could also noodle with plugins. take a sound and put a crazy effect chain on it.
delay->gate->bp filter->saturation->phaser->step sequencer effects (like d-blue glitch or audio damage bigseq)->delay->amp control (like stormgate, its a bit different than a noise gate).

[AK]

I don't do a great deal of pads but I do like adding what I would call, textures - which could be seen as a pad. Mine tend to be a lot less full and obvious than a pad though and I would often hp filter the whole thing too.

I use samplers myself for this kind of thing, I have a disk full of sampled and looped analog raw waveforms, pulse waves at varying cycles etc which I'll use for giving the patch a sense of pitch by underpinning whatever I'm using with that, blending it in via the filters and modulation controls. The main sample folder I look into though, is one which is packed with 'real' sounds, things like industrial noises and mechanical samples, engines turning over, field recordings and heaps of wierd stuff. These can be as long as 30 seconds or so and often have some kind of rhythmic element. The tricky part there is finding and isolating a section to produce a rhythmic loop which fits to a given track. That involes sample start time/end time and experimenting with the loop points. Hard to go into specific details as it's always a fresh approach when doing this and each sample will be entirely different but I'll usually have some form of modulation going on too, the volume envelope can be modulated to good effect like this, you don't really want to modulate pitch on a sampled loop which has a kind of rhythm as this will disrupt it but filters can be modulated to good effect.

I might add a few samples, some crackling type sound of a low subtle chord in with it, anything really, there's only your imagination but I really get a lot of mileage from that library I have ( the industrial noises and so on ) You can try lots of things really, create a huge reverb tail from just the musical elements in your track and loop it and hp filter it, add in some white noise and get modulating and adding other stuff to create a backdrop sound which also has a tonal element. What sorts of things have you been trying out?

I quite like Absynth for strange texture type sounds, it just seems to take to that kind of thing really well, although it took me a while to get decent stuff out of it, you can load samples into that and there's tons of ways to take them to new heights.

[::BLM::]

I normally just do a duplicate channel of my pad and then as stomper said 'noodle' with it.

I have started using recordings as well of anything really. I just place that into my tune and cut it up till it fits. I used my dogs bark the other day for a texture. Sounded decent using the waves stompbox plugins.

[twisted-space]

There's a nice tutorial for creating textures with alchemy here. You can apply the ideas in it to any wavetable/granular type synth. I've also got some interesting sounds from samplers that let you modulate sample start or postiton (modwheel to sample start position in my A4000), or by pitching samples right down.

[AK]

There's just no rules or even techniques to this, pads yeah, but textural stuff, no. We used to call them 'beds' as in a subtle ambience on which other things would build. You can do it where it's hardly even noticeable, but then take it out/mute and it's like somethings gone. I actually got into this when I went ITB, I have a dislikeness with tunes that are imprinted on an absolute silent backing, it's unnatural to me.

You can get odd noises from a lot of things and then tune and filter them into the backing of a solid bit of music, slowing down a waveform, ie: a saw by very low octaves ( and other waveforms ) gives you little cyclic clicks n pops which are sometimes intersting when mixed in with another suitable sound. Tuned 'noise'? Ok, you pretty much can't tune noise but a pad that has a place in the back of the mix can be mostly modulated noise with say a chord on another osc but the chord tone is almost subliminal. A bit of modulation to keep it cycling and interesting filtered noises to top it off and there's a 'bed' right there.

Incidently, if you like a bit of noise and you have hardware or can rout out & in, try recording at a very low level and then bringing the gain back up to 0db in your DAW app/editor, artifacts should arise which are quite often interesting and useable in their required context.

[pafufta816]

to get dynamic ambient noise i take a loop of a synth or field recording. i make it loop for 64 measures. i run the whole thing through a grain scatterer, which will stochastically (randomly) adjust the volume, in clusters, thereby giving me a synthetic dynamic range which is closer to real sound. at this point there are clusters of loudness and quietness, i then use high/lowpass filters and feedback of all types. in the end i get a big ol' wall of sound that undulates with a near realistic dynamic range.