How to Make Ambient Music Inspired by Biosphere, Shenzhou

Music Inspired by Biosphere (full track at end of video). I set off the fortnight with a deep listen to the album. Volume up, lying on the floor, eyes closed. This, like a lot of Biosphere work, is a deep album. Lots of low end, intensely mysterious. When you learn that Geir Jenssen lives in the far north of Norway it really feels like a representation of the location. The mystery of the Biosphere sound on the album opens up when you find out the source material. The entire album is made from samples of recordings of Claude Debussy. If you don’t know Debussy, he’s a reasonably modern classical composer, think of him as a jazz forerunner, with his strong modulation of harmonic structures. Even as an ambient forerunner with his vivid musical painting. He was influenced by gamelan, which you can hear in the melody and rhythm of much of his piano work The rendering of Debussy samples by Biosphere into something new and different is based on a few key things: • Sample selection • EQ of the samples • Filtering • Effects – mainly reverb and some saturation Big credit to Lars Lentz here as he has a fantastic breakdown on his website (). Rather than use high quality source material to make Biosphere Shenzhou, I thought it would be more fun to see what I could do with a low quality source. I made a template using sounds only from the Reason Orkester Refill. For those that don’t know, this dates back to around 2002. It was capable when it came out but with advances in technology it shows its age in the lack of expressiveness available. I set up a template in Ableton Live using panning, EQ and send reverb to try and achieve the placement of an orchestra. From here I improvised different parts in session view and ended up with 12 pieces, using some different keys. I selected each scene and then used export to render them all to audio. Simpler is my tool of choice. I brought the samples in and then decided which parts would work. Some I slowed down or played in different ranges, some I warped. It was all about experimenting with the sounds and settling on what sounded the best for the sample. This is the thing with sampling. The initial choice of sound is the most important part. You have to be happy with the source before you start changing it and adding effects, otherwise you’ll not be able to get the sound you want. Same for all music production really. 00:00 Intro 01:18 Main Track 04:28 Making the Samples 07:54 Main Track Again 10:02 Simpler Warp 10:52 Main Track Yet Again 20:57 Send Effects 21:57 Final Words 22:54 Full Track