Making dark ambient music with only guitar pedals
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- Опубліковано 8 лют 2025
- Korg Minilogue? SOMA Lyra 8? Who needs synths for ambient music when you have a thumb and some guitar pedals?
Chain is: Unplugged cable, Donner Yellow Fall delay, Eventide Timefactor delay, Eventide Space reverb, Ableton.
Taking the buzzing that you get by touching a cable and putting that through 2 delay pedals and a reverb gives you plenty of control over a drone-y, dark ambient noise. Sliding your thumb up the cable gives a carefully controlled buzz, while tapping it makes a burst of noise. I found that turning the feedback on the Yellow Fall up to over 100% creates a distorted scream which I can use (sparingly and cautiously!). I added that to the Timefactor's dual delays at 100% feedback which are modulated by an internal LFO, which create some wonderful tones and act almost as voices on their own. Finally, putting this through the Eventide Space's Black Hole algorithm turns the odd noises into a huge, washy, dark ambient pad.
DISCLAIMER: Don't go around touching the ends of random cables to see if it makes an interesting noise. I have more than enough stupidity for myself, I don't want to be responsible for yours too!
Do you like this video? Do you not? Why? Tell me in the comments if you have any feedback, it helps me improve my videos!
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FACEBOOK: / alastairwilsonmusic
DOWNLOAD HERE: alastairwilsonm...
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![006//R.E.M. [Melodic Ambient] - Mother 32 and Eventide Space](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/y8SN9WxiLXw/mqdefault.jpg)
![006//R.E.M. [Melodic Ambient] - Mother 32 and Eventide Space](/img/tr.png)
3:14.... Jesus
Joshua Zaragoza Maker of Heaven and Earth ✝
π!!
tell me about it
That drop tho
“So what instrument do you play?”
“Quarter inch jack”
This will def go into my alternative styles of playing collection, where you have such great hits like
- Tom Morello playing the cable
- Sam Battle with... the Game Boys
- Matt from black midi playing the phone live over the guitar pickups
booooooooooommmmm
So much purpose
This is how you open up a portal to hell...
No, this is what the 4th plane sounds like
@@Frank-oq2lv Dante?
It takes an opened mind to open one
I'd listen to a whole hour of this, honestly.
speechless over how you did so much with so little. Thank you.
Total joy. Beautiful and dark. All my sounds I get from my guitar pedals with my violin... 💀🎻✨
Really cool, Alastair. This reminds me a bit of Nurse With Wound's 'Soliloquy For Lilith". On that, I think Steven Stapleton was able to generate the sounds just by moving his hands above the assorted effects. You've taken it a stage further here.
Interesting - I'd never heard of that before. Thanks for putting it on my radar.
wow, who knew that the ultimate VCO is a thumb! Love it!
This is so simple and obvious idea that i droped my jaw out of excitement. Bravo!
This is so good for writing omg
Too awesome! Perfect dark ambient music.
best dark ambiance on youtube.
Oh the ideas that are now flooding my brain ... if you can do this with a guitar cable, then I should really be able to do much more with a guitar ...
LOL : D !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I use a lot of pedals and feedback for sound design. I decided it was time to pick up a cheap guitar. I can't play but I use a slide, tune it to drop D. The notes seem to fit together well. One classic technique us to turn the guitars volume off, hut the string(s) then turn up the volume. It gives a synthetic like drone as opposed to having the initial attack of a guitar string. A bow or e-bow is fun.
This is beyond excellent! I'd love to hear a full hour of this.
Simple: Cryo Chamber. They have tons of this stuff. You can find it on the UA-cam Music app, or purchase from Bandcamp.
This is very good. A longer piece along these lines (20 mins or so) would be very interesting and impressive.
Wow. Just. Wow.
This is soooooooo coooooooooooooool!!! And it sounds absolutely awesome. Great video :-))) Thanks. I´m using only a DAW and soft synths and so I just came here, because I was curious to see what exactly you are doing here with the guitar pedals, but I didn`t expect this!!! This is freakin`awesome and very experimental. There are no borders for a creative mind.
Thank you! Glad you liked it :) I do try to think outside the box for creating music and I highly recommend everyone does!
Here we can see the creativity GJ MAN ;)
amazing creativity, much love
So glad to discover I am not the only one who uses this "advanced technique" for creating music. :-D
Jamie Fullerton So glad to see that after approx. 50.000 years that music has been around, people still experiment and find new ways to make it!!
This is like Ridley Scott , John Carpenter movie music. “ Escape beneath new york” underwater. Sigourney Weaver “ Alien” dark side of the moon. Very creative, great music. I want to blast it through my moog synth and marshal stack
What a great experiment! Very powerful and profound. I love the organic sound from all of this, very good!
I love how this would work with Doom 64, Aubrey Hodges would be proud
What’s not to like. brother this was so awesome. I’m loving it. Blade runner Whale calls. 🐳 So so Dark. And really hypnotic Way to go 👍🏻👍🏻. And there definitely needs to be a 6 hour version next
Really smart ! I love the result and I will try that with my Axe-FX ! Thanks for the idea !
Have fun!
Great session, with so few resources such a wicked sound
So I have been using TH-U software which allows building fairly complex pedal chains. I managed to make a preset for this and added a whammy pedal to control pitch of the signal. Thanks for the idea.
Excellent stuff and demo! :)
Simply fantastic… I am going to add this to my music as well. Great way creating atmospheres…!
Pure genius! thanks for this awesome moment!
phenomenal.
This is mindblowing!
Really awesome mate. Loved every minute of it. Very cool ideas.
Thanks! I did a live set a couple months back and ended up playing with the reverb and delay more than the actual modular, so I'm glad I discovered these sounds.
+Alastair Wilson Have you tried an oscillating fuzz pedal at the front end? Something like a Harmonic Percolator clone. It could add another more crazier dimension to those sounds.
I would be worried about running the whole thing through a fuzz pedal because it might turn into a noise-y mess, but then again I don't own any fuzz pedals! A small amount of saturation might warm it up really nicely perhaps.
+Alastair Wilson Just use it sparingly. A little goes a long way. Just use for impact and or texture.
And it can be used with that awesome rack rig you have.
This is so great. I do hope you can do more videos like this with different pedals. Plus just a bit of tutorial on hooking all of it up. This is a real good cideo
If I get any more pedals I'll definitely do another video with them! Glad you like this one.
Dam I should have you Score my Films, Awesome Dude
Bravo! creating a work may seem random and accidental, but sometimes something like a fate or a miracle happens. It looks like something is going to happen and it controls you. This work seems go onbeyond you. It seems an spiritual
power are creating a creature.
Amazing!
Impressive
Well dang: if only I could afford those two NICE Eventide pedals. So I had to make do with yanking the cable out of my MicroFreak and send my thumb signals through the much cheaper and it’ll-do chain with a Zoom Multistomp MS70 CDR and a Mooer PE100, monkeying around with different settings. It’s got…some…potential. 😄😄
Very inspiring; thank you for sharing! In fact, some "pedals" are actually somewhat synthesizers, & all they need is an TTCO (Thumb Tip Controlled Oscillator) to play. :-)
I'm addicted & going to try this at home. Natürlich nur with safe cables; I'm in Germany, there is no other way. Strymon Nightsky + meris Polymoon + perhaps… ok, let's stay suprised.
Sehr effektiv !
Greetings from La Paz, Bolivia!!!
Do you have more dark themes?
If by 'dark themes' you mean 'darker-sounding music', you should check out my playlist of atonal patches:
ua-cam.com/play/PLeUgD2DGNTv3bLoaV4GvSYmyvUo5I6-AO.html
Holy fucking god dude! Speechless!
This is great.
You have my full and undivided attention with this. I know very little about audio in pretty much every capacity. I've never had much of a musical talent, but I know what I like and try to be somewhat educated on why I like certain things and try to get a base understanding of how it may be produced. This kind of stuff, creative, strange, and unconventional methods of producing encapsulating sounds is some of my favorite, and I wish I had the technical know how to produce these kinds of sounds, but all the tech and equipment may as well be completely alien to me... I hope I can get an opportunity to learn about how these kinds of sounds are made and how I can maybe produce some stuff of my own...
It takes time to learn - but then again, what doesn’t? I for one think it’s worth it :)
Wow, that's great!!!
Genius
vraiment impressionnant
Great fun, cool sonics. The only problem is, when I'm done watching, YT wants to show me a bunch of guitar-geek videos - and I'm an avowed synth-geek! 😄 Thanks for posting!
Careful what you say, maybe I'll REALLY start confusing your youtube suggestions by plugging my electric guitar into the modular.........
I straddle the two, I only use pedals and tape, along with feedback loops, I eventually bought a guitar. I can't "play" it but it generates a lot of sounds.
Just Great!!!
This is the coolest!!!
Hey that's pretty fukin clever Trey awsome dude!!!!!
Amazing.
This is great!
fuckin fire mate
I lovee it !!
THIS!
Nice one... Might have a go at this myself ;-D
ΠΑΡΑ ΠΟΛΥ ΩΡΑΙΟ
wonderful...and with just a jack plug lol.
Top effects ✅
Hey could we sample a snippet from this video? I feel like this with a analog drum beat and some chopping could make a really cool idioteque-esque track. This is really great stuff I love the sounds here
Of course! Please just credit me and this video if you upload the track anywhere.
Mind = blown
this is so good. reminds me a bit, tho this is way more talented, of me when i discovered reason in 2002 at a local library pc room - they had some funding and installed lots of music ware - and i thought, 'bet this is just like visual software', and so i stole some guitar riff and made loads of cool tunes just from distorting it with lfo's etc. fun times. later i discovered warp records and dark ambient and drone, and ended up buying loads more records that sounded like what i had made..
edit - i wrote the wrong year in....
Need I say, your thumb skills are gruesome sir 👆 .
Eventide pedals would make a barf sound amazing
genuis
Fuck thats cool
Fucking amazing!
Gardena of linmiri
Add a therimin to the mix
ok. so I need to buy some pedals
Wrapped in sonic cotton wool. Awesome. Have you tried playing this back alongside some of your other recordings?
I haven't actually - I can't believe I haven't considered layering multiple different recordings. I'll definitely have to do that in a video at some point.
Haha that’s great
Would it be possible to achieve the cumulative effects of this chain with just the Eventide H9Max?
Why did you choose the Donner delay for this chain? Doesn’t the Eventide TimeFactor function as a delay? How do the Donner Delay & the TimeFactor complement each other?
Are you using Ableton for additional affects, for additional soft synths, or only as a “mixer”?
Thank you for presenting this elegantly simple dark ambient rig! Definitely is a back-2-basics rig
From memory, the H9 Max only runs 1 algorithm/effect at a time? In which case you'd need a H9 Max for each effect in the chain, you couldn't just use 1.
I didn't choose the Donner delay for any particular reason - it's just a small, noisy analogue delay I had lying around, which I included simply for more options. The Timefactor is a great delay on its own.
I only used Ableton to record the audio, I didn't add any other processing or sounds.
Hope that cleared some stuff up for you!
@@AlastairWilsonMusic Thanks!
I will have to definitely explore the specifications of the H9Max in careful detail.
I saw a clip on SonicState that implied the H9Max had all the effects of Time / Space in one pedal. I assumed that meant I could daisy chain the effects of all those pedals with just the H9Max pedal.
That would have been a sad box-opening surprise!
My understanding of the H9 was that it could run algorithms from all of Eventide's pedals with the downside of not being one knob per function, but still could only run one at a time... I don't own one though so it would probably be worth double checking that in case I'm wrong. If you find out, let me know!
@@AlastairWilsonMusic I will let you know my learnings.
I have seen ppl use an iPad interface, so that opens up more controls. Still would be nice to stack up effects in one pedal... although that would reduce hw sales 🙃
@@AlastairWilsonMusic From a download of the currently released manual, only one effect preset can be used at a time.
The pedal also supports reasonable signal paths: mono in / mono out; mono-in / stereo out; stereo in / stereo out.
The pedal can be controlled by iOS devices, MacOS, or Windows OS.
Next area of inquiry is of the actual presets. For example, there may be a preset that is a "daisy-chain" of a preset native to the Time Factor pedal and of a preset native to the Space pedal. The manual that I downloaded described how to access preset variables, but did not contain a listing/description of each available preset
Would rubber gloves make this safer?
Great job & sounds!!
You already have an artist name for your thumb?
Just my name at the moment, I'm less of an artist and more of a guy with a computer and an LED strip :) If my stuff gets more popular then maybe I'll look into collabs with short film makers or something, I'd love to do a soundtrack one day.
@@AlastairWilsonMusic We're hope in it. Should get one hour maybe? :'Đ
I have a cuestion i can use a interface audio with a cable and virtual pedals same you use?????
If I understand your question right, that should be possible - as long as you're getting hum, it should work through virtual pedals just as well as hardware pedals (the Eventides in this video are digital, so it's basically the same as virtual pedals anyway).
@@AlastairWilsonMusic ty for the answer
What is the bear minimum stuff for doing this kind of music?
A nice reverb - hardware, software, doesn't matter - and everything else is just down to personal taste :)
Awesome!
Is there any way of tuning that rather then changing pitch after recording?
I work with feedback tape and pedals mainly. This is amazing. I haven't tried those Eventide units yet. They certainly sound like they're earning their keep. How much of the sound is Able to post production?
It was a while ago now but I think I used some multiband compression to tame resonances, some gentle EQing (probably just high and low shelves) to improve the frequency balance, and then a limiter for the peaks. I try to keep post processing minimal in all videos!
How did you change pitch? Like at 3:14 it's going down?
Sounds awesome!
Can't remember off the top of my head, but from the video it looks like I'm fading between 2 high-feedback delays which have different pitches - probably at the same time as the modulation on the Space is moving downwards. Glad you like it!
WET: 10
Why do I imagine flooding highway tunnels when I hear this?
That's a dark and very striking image, I can see it too. You got a wild imagination.
Shit, 1k USD for those two pedals. OUCH!
Good work though.
Could you output from the effects into a synth input?
100% you could, with any synth that has an input for external audio!
Alastair Wilson Tnx for the advice. Ran it through my Moog Grandmother synth and OMG. Not as good as yours but good nonetheless. Excellent video and ideas
So you’re making the next Stranger Things soundtrack yeah? 🤌🏼🤌🏼🤌🏼
Can’t wait for the Kate Bush collab
Can someone do similar things with cheaper pedals?
Absolutely! Different pedals will give different tones. The yellow Donner pedal in this video allows over 100% delay feedback and only cost me £22, for example.
@@AlastairWilsonMusic oh good... I've been wanting a polysynth to make some massive ambient pad sounds but then i realized the right delay/reverb setup could turn my old ARP odyssey into an ambient monster and that would save butt loads of money which i don't have... Tis a bit hard to pick the right gear on the budget though... Thanks!
If you're looking for the same dark ambient sound, Eventide have a plugin version of this reverb which you can buy. Otherwise shop around and you'll definitely find some pedals for making your arp into ambient pads!
@@AlastairWilsonMusic thanks for the suggestion! I like to be all hands on and computer free. It hurts my wallet but computers stifle my creativity somehow... Anyway, thanks again! I'll keep looking
Does it make any difference if I use a modfactor instead of the timefactor?
It will, but probably not too much - just a different flavour of sounds. Try it out!
wonder if daft punk has seen this?
I tried this and it didn't work, well not like this. What did I do wrong man??
I assume you're using the same pedals - did you check that your delay feedback was up at roughly 100% or 101% with a slow LFO on the delay filter? Also the blackhole reverb is reversed, which you do by turning the delay knob to the left. Does that help?
No, I cant afford those pedals. I was using Boss dd-7 Mxr carbon copy digitech delay and EHX cathedral.
I haven't used those pedals so I can't comment on how to recreate this with them, but you might want to check for starters whether the delay can feedback over 100%. Also I highly doubt you'll get anything close to this sound without an Eventide Space - it's excellent at dark, eerie, huge reverbs like this, and an ordinary reverb pedal might not work as well with the cable buzz. Sorry I can't be of more help, but I don't know how to fix the problem when you have different pedals.
I achieved this particular sound with tape delay + long reverb.
The delay is really fast (synced 1/64), producing a dronish metallic sound with a note in it. THIS is the secret for not cluttering up the sound with just noise repeating itself. When you turn the feedback to 100% and above, the sound will sustain itself, reinforcing the drone note.
The long reverb consists of maximum size and tail to shoot the sound up in space and stay there.
can i sample this royalty-free?
If you sample it and use it in a track/video/etc, then you don't have to pay me but I require crediting for it - please message me about it!
@@AlastairWilsonMusic ok, if i will made something - i will write you :)
Kids these days with their mop-top hair styles and their effects pedals
What you got it is really cool, but two eventide pedals, are not just some pedals (same budget for a minilogue and a Lyra8) ! 😂 You are cheating!
2 powerful, unique analog synthesisers, or 2 DSP pedals... some of us make worse financial decisions than others :)
Didn’t get the danger of touching different cables in the description. What can go wrong?
should list the pedals used
Check the description!
sorry, today it poped up, for some reason the desription did not pop up, once in a while youtube acts goofy
Nice drone
Wonder what it be like with big sky
I wonder what it would be like with a Space AND a Big Sky...
Only pedal i would love to get because of the demos
I'm going to pretend you mean the Space instead of the Big Sky there ;)
WTF!
I'll take that in a good way ;)
I was impressed....thanks!
why not not interlace visuals / make video art? show what you're doing but what about textural layering of forests, sky, abstract shadow shapes, or whatever comes to mind. because knobs is never that interesting to watch regarding performance, in general. just some thoughts!
I just used the video of the pedals so that you can see what I'm doing to make the sounds, as proof that there's no other trickery involved. To me, this was less of a performance video and more of a demo, but I can see where you're coming from. Thanks for the feedback nonetheless!
sure yeaH! i do understand. might be fun to do both - still show the pedals, but some arty stuff too somehow. maybe i will try to do it :)
I'll bear it in mind for if I do another video like this!
what did you use to make this? i'd like to try this
Check the description :)
About the only thing guitar pedals are good for
As a guitarist, I think this offends me lol