F I S H B A L L : A M B I E N T V I E W 1
TRACK LIST
CONCEPT & PRODUCTION
Album launch text :
My third album entitled "Ambient View 1" is now available; released under the band name of "Fishball".
This is an ambient instrumental album. The songs are comprised of binaural bass drones, natural jungle/ forest sounds as well as unobtrusive gong-bell music.
The album is meant be an accompanying backdrop of sounds to help you focus and concentrate on your tasks; be it for reading or studying or meditation (or perhaps even "remote viewing"). The music stays in the background and does not draw your attention to listen to it.
Concept
Ambient View 1 is an ambient instrumental album of gong-bell music. The songs should create an audio environment which allows the listener to focus and concentrate on what they are doing. This is useful for homework or studying or meditation other esoteric practices like remote viewing. The audio is in 3 layers consisting of binaural bass-drone, natural forest/ jungle sounds and unobtrusive gong-bell music.Plan
Basically only three things: (1) Use a deep sub-bass drone to block out the world, (2) use nature's ambient sounds as foreground scenery, and (3) have some music in the background.
I envisage a scenario like this... You are walking slowly through the jungle; you pass a village and there's music being performed somewhere. You listen for a while and move on.In terms of music composition, (a) the bass drone is the most important as it blocks out the outside world, (b) the natural ambient sounds is the next most important as it sets the scene in the jungle (or wherever), and so (c) the music (which is the most amount of work) is just part of the background.As it happens, I had written a lot of gamelan-inspired gong & bell music in the late 80s / early 90s on my trusty old Ensoniq EPS. Specifically, these gong & bell songs were written to convey mood through texture; rather than seek attention with melody.Sound Design
Ambient View 1 was created entirely using Reason v9.5 software.
The Sub-Bass drones work well to block out the world. Following popular theory, the bass is binaural; with Left & Right detuned. The Sub-Bass uses Little LFO's 4 x Sinewaves; 2 for the Left & 2 for the Right; each side's Bass Sine set 1 octave apart. Then I use 4-Phase LFO to controls the loudness in slow rotation as Left1 @ 0°, Right1 @ 90°, Left 2 @ 180°, Right2 @ 270°.
The natural forest/ jungle sounds are L-M-R mixes (Left-Middle-Right) of various sounds from FreeSound.org, each about 30 secs using 32kHz sample rate. This is then re-pitched 2 octaves down so now playback is 8kHz using NN-19 sampler.
I use a lot of PX-7 and most of the music synths are Combinators of NN-19 and PX-7. As it happens, mixing the music at really low volume levels doesn't work because the brain is straining to try to hear what is going on. This is distracting. So the music has to be at a comfortable listenable volume level. Note that all the original gong & bell music needed to be slowed down in tempo to be around 70 bpm.
The drums used were entirely Kong and using only the in-built drum synths (no samples).
About the Ambient Jungle Sounds
Basically I made 8 wave files (*.wav) of ambient jungle sounds. Each song would use 2 of these wave files and repeat them. These are freely available for download at FreeSound.org as follows:- Wild Jungle 1, Wind Jungle 2, Wild Jungle 3, Wild Jungle 4, Wild Jungle 5, Wild Jungle 6, Wild Jungle 7 & Wild Jungle 8.
Each jungle wave file is a LMR mix (Left-Mid-Right) of 3 separate mono snippets. The snippets used were from FreeSound.org & were typically edited to mono of 30 seconds duration at 32kHz playback rate. You have to edit out all the non-natural sound (eg murmurs, footsteps, cars). The LMR mix is made of animal sounds on the left and right with atmospheric sounds (at low loudness) in the middle. The animal sounds were birds, frogs, insects and monkeys. The atmospherics were wind, rain and streaming water.
The natural jungle snippets have shrieks and shrills which are jarring. For the mood that I wanted, I pitched them down by 2 octaves. So the 32 kHz jungle snippets are re-pitched by changing the sample rate to 8 kHz [in Audacity, this is Effect\ Change Speed\ Speed Multiplier = 0.25]. The 30 second snippets are now expanded to 2 minutes in duration. This process is the same as putting the snippets into a sampler and playing it back at 2 octaves down.
Production
As explained before, the soundscape design is only 3 layers:-
The sub-bass Drone
The Jungle ambient noises
The gong-bell Music
To enhance the differences between the Jungle sounds and the Music, they have their own separate reverb chains (see pic.)
JUNGLE ->- Delay#1 ->- EQ#1 ->- Reverb#1 ->-
MUSIC -->- Delay#2 ->- EQ#2 ->- Reverb#2 ->-
The main differences in the reverb chain settings are that (a) the Music has a longer (pre-) Delay, and (b) Jungle has boosted mid-EQ while Music has boosted High-EQ.
