Ambient sounds, presets and music in general has been a long-time preoccupation for us here at ModeAudio, and we’ve been delighted to see such a growth in interest for all things musically hazy, slow-burning and meditative in recent years.
One particular trend we’ve picked up on is the infiltration of Ambient techniques and sonic materials in other genres, from thumping Techno and House through to Hip Hop, LoFi styles and even Pop music.
It is with this in mind that we’ve arrived at today’s tutorial topic, creating Ambient layers with our brand new VST and AU effect plugin, Airspace. Airspace is a hybrid reverb and delay plugin primarily designed with the Ambient producer in mind, but this is far from the only type of music-maker that will find a use for our new music production tool.
So today we’re going to look at using Airspace to create Ambient layers in a slice of chilled, mellow, LoFi Hip Hop, using loops taken from a sample pack release of ours, Breezy Keys - Hip Hop Piano Loops. We’ll cover a couple of ways of using Airspace in your mix, but both are beyond easy to implement and will bring a smile to your face surprisingly quickly!
Before we start, you can pick up Airspace right here and either grab a license, or make use of the free 15 day trial to give it a spin before making it your own. Let’s get cooking!
1. Doing The Groundwork
To kick things off, here’s a quick mix featuring 4 loops from Breezy Keys - drums, bass guitar and two piano parts:
Things are nice and chill, but I think the background of the mix could use filling out a bit to add some depth and intrigue - enter Airspace, which in this first instance we’re going to setup on a bus track rather than on any of the instrumental tracks directly.
A quick and easy way to do this in Logic Pro, which is the DAW I’m using here, is to simply click the ‘send’ button on any of our existing tracks, navigating up to ‘bus 1’ which then automatically creates the bus or auxiliary track for us.
We’ll now see the bus track displayed to the right of our audio track strip in the inspector on the left, or we can bring up the mixer by hitting the ‘x’ key command to view it there - let’s load up an instance of Airspace at the top of this new track.
We can now route audio from our 4 loops into Airspace simply by using the send controls into bus 1 - I’m going to start with the 2nd piano loop, ‘Scarlet_80_F_PianoTrebleChords’, turning it’s first send volume dial all the way up to -3dB.
2. All Aboard The Airspace Bus
Now comes the fun part; tweaking Airspace’s controls to reach a sound that we like. I’m going to start by flicking through a few presets, hitting Airspace’s preset browser bar at the top of the interface and looking through both the ‘Ambient’ and ‘Cosmos’ folders, which are tailored towards deep, spacey sound.
I like what the preset ‘Eastern Touch’ is doing here, this is how it sounds with the piano chords running through it:
This preset uses all 3 of Airspace’s modules, which are dual reverbs and a stereo delay, creating a lovely, high-pitched, crackling drone courtesy of the treble piano notes. This is one of Airspace's great strengths - transforming a single sound source into a rippling stream of evolving sound.
Having Airspace on a send however makes it a cinch to send audio from other tracks through to it as well, so let’s try adding some of the other piano loop into the plugin as well:
This deepens the atmosphere, creating a drifting chord that seems to hang in the air like a cloud - pure Ambient nectar, in other words! Here’s how this sounds on context, with the loops themselves audible again:
I love how Airspace creates this shimmering background layer that just seems to sit beneath and above the direct audio from our instruments, filling out the space and creating a fuller, more satisfying mix.
3. Bass In Space
Moving onto our second use for Airspace, let’s turn our attention to the bass part. This time, instead of sending some of the bass audio through our Airspace instance on the bus track, let’s load up a fresh instance of the plugin directly on the bass track itself.
Again, I’m doing to flick through the preset folders and see if I can find something that works for the mix - I’m looking for a nice, deep, rumbling Ambient tone here, so again I’m going to focus on both the Ambient and Cosmos folders.
This time, I’m found something I like in the preset ‘Hourglass’, which sounds like this:
This preset again uses all 3 of Airspace’s modules, combining reverb and delay to create a rich wash of audio - what I especially like about this preset in combination with the bass guitar though, is how you can still make out the individual bass notes being played, amidst the soothing rush of sound conjured by the plugin.
Let’s listen to how this new instance of Airspace as applied to the bass sounds in context with the rest of the mix:
We’ve taken our humble slice of LoFi Hop and given it some deep atmosphere and mystery, using nothing more than 2 instance of our Airspace plugin. Not bad for a few minutes’ work, I think you’ll agree!
I hope today’s tutorial has given you an insight into how Airspace can be worked into almost any genre - to check out the plugin and get started on your 15 day free trial, download it here and until next time, get creative!
