AMBIENT MUSIC - soundscaping loops

Hello everyone. It's a very rainy day here in Croatia and it's perfect for talking about ambient music, loops and soundscaping so sit back and relax with the sounds you are about to hear.

(here's a picture of the Como lake in Italy. I visited Como earlier this year and for some reason this track reminds me of the foggy, rainy view of the lake we saw when we first got there while on our way to France)

Anyway, me and my bandmates got together the other day and did a one hour session at my place. We cut about 40 minutes of separated material and then decided to review it later and see what kind of editing can be done. The track starts with a simple loop played on a Micro Korg from ''jam no.2'' and it's based on playing around with the pitch shift in 2 octaves.

Then, another Korg comes in, from an entirely different part of the jam. I cut it out and put it on top of the first loop. This one has a really soft, airy feel to it and compliments the atmosphere perfectly. These two Korgs ended up as our basis for everything else we were going to put on top.

It just so happened that we had a Warren Ellis signature Eastwood Mandostang that day and we tuned it in D - A - D - G tuning. The Mandostang is this really crazy instrument with only 4 strings that has a feel of the bass guitar but you play it like a normal guitar (only with 4 strings) and it's great for making unstructured loops and all kinds of effect pedals. I made this multi-layer loop on the Mandostang that doesn't really have a structure but is in tune with the Korg.

These 3 elements - the MicroKorg loops and the Mandostang provided us with a base but the track needed something more. It needed more of a ''human touch'' to it because it seemed a bit too cold. Lucky for us, Dimitrije was in town (I wrote about our unplanned recording session yesterday https://steemit.com/music/@grobens/unplanned-recording-session-dimitrije-dimitrijevic-ponestace) so I decided to ask him to record some vocals. I didn't want him to think about them too much so I said: I'm gonna play you something and just do whatever comes to mind first. That way I knew he was singing from the initial emotion he felt and it was just perfect in the track.

In the end, my drummer insisted on finishing the track with ''some vague sense of a rhythm''. We knew the track was way too unstructured to put a beat on it and since it's comprised of several different takes that were not recorded ''on click'', we needed a specific approach. We ended up simulating the sound of the waves slowly breaking in the shore but not with a snare drum. No. My crazy drummer played a cardboard tube. He figured out that if he moves his palm up and down the tube slowly, it makes a ''calming sea sound''.

The track was recorded with a single condenser microphone in the center of the room (except for the Korg - we wanted to have a clean Korg signal so it was recorded via a soundcard) so you can hear us talking and laughing in the background and even clicking on effect pedals with our feet.

Here's the track, I do hope you'll enjoy it!