Ambient music: the genre where silence is golden, repetition is king, and subtle shifts in sound create entire worlds within the listener’s mind. It’s a soundscape of emotions, often found in the background yet possessing a powerful ability to influence our mood and focus. So, how do you make ambient music? The path is different for each musician, but some shared principles help pave the way.

As we venture into this soundscape exploration, let’s acknowledge something important. Entering a new music genre can feel intimidating. This might feel even more pronounced with ambient music because many assume it’s all about technical complexity and esoteric production tricks. Truth be told, much of it is incredibly accessible, even for beginners. This guide serves as a starting point, demystifying the process of making ambient music and giving you tools to find your unique sounds.

Table of Contents:

Where Does Ambient Music Come From?

You might be surprised that the desire to craft immersive soundscapes existed long before the digital age. It can be argued that French composer Erik Satie, who worked in the early 20th century, was creating ambient music before the term even existed.

He called his works “furniture music” — compositions meant to exist in the background of social gatherings, adding a sonic dimension to the environment. The official title for the genre came about in the 1970s with the works of Brian Eno. His album “Discreet Music” in 1975 planted the seeds. However, it was “Ambient 1: Music for Airports” in 1978 where he fully embraced the term “ambient music.”

Eno wasn’t afraid to play with unusual methods, even designing a deck of cards to spark random music creation. Eno’s early experiments often involved tape loops, synthesizers, and found sounds, manipulated to create extended, evolving soundscapes. To experience his concepts firsthand, have a listen to “Music for Airports.”

Pay attention to the extended, drawn-out notes and gentle, atmospheric qualities that set the stage for what ambient music is today. Over time, this focus on texture and sonic environments expanded, integrating field recordings, unconventional instruments, and emerging electronic instruments.

Aphex Twin, known for groundbreaking electronic music productions, offers a glimpse into this evolution in his landmark album “Selected Ambient Works 85-92.” The track “Xtal” uses glitchy textures, hypnotic melodies, and intricate sonic tapestries that define his place within the genre.

Creating Ambient Music

Creating ambient music isn’t solely about complex sound design and advanced production knowledge. It’s more about using simple tools in clever ways, focusing on feel over rigidly following musical structures. This sentiment rings true for established and newer music producers.

Building Sonic Atmospheres

how to make ambient music

Creating a compelling sonic space often begins with choosing interesting sounds. But this doesn’t have to involve expensive plugins or obscure samples. It can be as simple as using instruments in unexpected ways. 

  • Simple Melodies, Extended Sounds: Unlike other genres reliant on hooks and prominent rhythmic elements, ambient music thrives on simplicity. A straightforward, even melancholic, melody played on a synth with lots of reverb can form the basis of a captivating ambient track.
  • Drones: Don’t shy away from drones. By carefully crafting a single extended note or chord, often run through modulation effects, you can achieve a hypnotic sonic bedrock that gives a track immense depth.
  • Field Recordings: Take a step back from traditional musical elements and experiment with recordings taken from everyday surroundings. City streets, a park, your kitchen, the gentle whirring of a computer fan — these everyday sounds can provide a fascinating dimension. Processed with effects like reverb and delay, they can form integral parts of your ambient pieces.
  • Textural Layering: Combine various sonic elements: a soft, reversed piano, granular synthesis sprinkled on top, perhaps distant nature recordings layered underneath. By weaving different sounds that compliment each other, your composition transforms from a collection of individual parts into an immersive world. William Basinski is masterful at this. You can get lost in the sonic worlds of his album, “The Disintegration Loops,” which utilizes layered tape loops in constant decay. This sonic deterioration, far from sounding messy, creates the music’s eerie beauty.
  • Harmonic Exploration: Conventional music theory tells you which notes should and shouldn’t go together, but you can toss those “rules” out in favor of experimentation. By deliberately venturing into unconventional chord progressions or allowing dissonances to interact, your sound develops its own character. Think of it as intentionally creating “happy accidents” in the studio.

Creating Movement and Depth

Once you’ve laid your sonic foundations, adding subtle movement keeps things interesting. A steady beat isn’t your goal; instead, think of ambient music like an evolving ecosystem, gradually changing as time progresses.

  • Embrace Randomness: Explore features in your digital audio workstation like “randomize” to create unexpected variations in MIDI notes or effect parameters. Let serendipity work in your favor and inspire happy accidents in the music production process. It could be as simple as changing the timing of notes slightly in a repeating phrase or automating filter cutoffs. You never know what compelling patterns may emerge.
  • Generative Tools: If you enjoy randomness, you might really connect with generative music creation tools. Generative music software (there are tons of options available) use algorithms to make choices in real-time. This isn’t about letting your computer take control completely, it’s about embracing collaboration with the technology to achieve surprising results you might not come up with through deliberate effort.

Space and Time Effects

how to make ambient music

This genre embraces spatial effects — tools that manipulate sound placement and perceived distance. These are your tools for depth, movement, and sonic storytelling, and often, the key to understanding how to make ambient music with dimension.

  • Reverb and Delay: It’s hard to overstate how impactful these are. The strategic application of these effects can make the listener feel like the sound originates inside a cathedral or from across a vast canyon. These aren’t meant to simply “clean up” sound — think of them as essential tools for composition in their own right.
  • Panning Techniques: This method mimics how humans hear sound differently depending on its direction. By automating panning, volume, or other parameters to simulate movement around the listener, your track gains a realistic, three-dimensional quality. Tools for this range from dedicated plugins to simply automating parameters of your existing panning controls. Imagine a pad sweeping around the listener’s head or a wash of white noise that shifts from ear to ear. These effects create an incredibly immersive, otherworldly experience.
Key Effect Explanation
Reverb Emulates the way sound behaves in different spaces, such as concert halls or churches, and can be used to create immersive atmospheres. Explore convolution reverbs, too, which use recordings of actual spaces (impulse responses) to recreate incredibly realistic sonic environments.
Delay Generates repetitions of the original sound at set intervals. These can build depth, rhythm, or used subtly to thicken a sound without being overtly obvious. Explore delay plugins with diffusion or modulation options — these can blur the lines between delay and reverb for unique results.
Chorus Subtly duplicates and detunes the signal to give a shimmering quality that can also work to “widen” sound to fill the stereo field more effectively.
Flanger Related to chorus, it differs by creating sweeping comb filtering effects for movement that are great when you want something otherworldly and spacey.

Making Ambient Music Your Own

Understanding how to make ambient music that resonates with listeners and stands out from the countless tracks online requires something more than technical knowledge. It needs a touch of you – your individual tastes, artistic sensibilities, and anything else you can imagine incorporating to set your sound sources apart from the crowd. This requires experimentation.

Start with ambient producers you love within the genre. Analyze what they do, the instruments they use (or don’t use), and how those choices impact the listening experience. Ask yourself what intrigues you. Why do those sounds elicit specific emotional reactions?

Avoid becoming paralyzed by “doing things the right way” — focus on discovering your style, and above all else, have fun. This exploration and discovery is how you create ambient music that’s truly unique, allowing you to add your own story to ambient music’s constantly evolving lineage.

Conclusion – How to Make Ambient Music

Ambient music production is an art that requires both creativity and technical skill. If you’re eager to refine your abilities and explore new sonic landscapes, joining Mix Elite Academy could be your next step. As a member, you’ll gain access to premium courses, over 500+ in-depth lessons, top-tier sample and preset packs, and exclusive student discounts of up to 50% off on thousands of plugins. Plus, you’ll connect with a private community of like-minded producers, all focused on mastering the craft of music production.

Elevate your ambient music journey with us today!