Instant Eno Ambient Music

2009 February 9
by Kent Sandvik

instant_eno2.pngI was reading somewhere about Eno’s constant experiments with creating ambient background music scenarios with constantly changing soundscapes. So I did a quick experiment just using Logic Pro with no keyboard.

I created 15 instances of sound instruments. Then populated them with various pads and long-scaped synths. Each midi track has different lengths and is looped so this will go on for a while. The actual MIDI information was created randomly by just using the paint tool.

The rest was to set the BPM to 5bpm, maybe the slowest song I’ve ever created. And the total lenght is 600 or more bars.

The final touch is to add a couple of big Space Designers on the output to get that spacey sound.

That’s it. Took me less than ten minutes. I will let it run in the background in case it provides creativity or not. Sometimes this kind of music is so simple to make so it’s not even art, any longer.

6 Responses leave one →
  1. Diego permalink
    February 9, 2009

    i wanna hear a piece of it :D

  2. February 11, 2009

    I too would like to hear this… Please.

  3. February 12, 2009

    Interesting method – I’d be interested in the detail – instruments etc.

  4. Jonas permalink
    February 18, 2009

    måste ba’ älska eno ambient musa :)

  5. February 28, 2009

    I should upload the Logic file, stay tuned (it’s actually over on my work computer as I did it for testing out stuff…). Need to render it over there, too.

    I have a love/hate relationship with ambient music — it better be good. It’s super-easy to make sleazy or copycat ambient music, crank up the reverb and use slow loops…

  6. March 4, 2009

    Kent,
    Long time since I’ve been here. I’d love to hear the piece as well. I’m enjoying learning Logic Studio (I finally picked it up a month after it’s release – thanks for offering to get me Logic 7 Pro at a discount some years back). I host a podcast entitled The Sunday Soundtrack…maybe I can feature a snippet of the tune if you deem it ok.

    Cheers,
    Doug
    Twitter: mrfresh

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