How I Create Movement in Music Without a Beat

With my meditation music, I’m usually not using quantization or sticking to a grid. I’m not thinking in a set number of bars for each section. It’s more of an intuitive flow.

When I first started writing this music, one of my techniques was simply layering and filling in the spaces. There are a lot of sustained notes in the ambient and meditative music I create, so that gave me a place to start.

As a simple example, I might play a sustained chord for three to five seconds, then leave roughly 30 seconds before it appears again. But it isn’t that rigid. The distance between those chords changes. I’m not trying to return to the beginning of a sequence. I’m just moving through the piece.

I think of it like waves in the ocean. It’s a continuous flow rather than something returning to a fixed starting point.

In those spaces, I might introduce another sound. Maybe it’s a call and response, or another chord continuing the progression. I’ll follow the same process, letting that sound return with different amounts of space between each appearance.

Then I might do the same with single notes. Together, those layers can become what you’d call a chord progression, though I’ve never really looked at it that way.

It goes back to something I’ve mentioned before: if it feels right and it sounds right, it’s probably right. When this genre was new to me, that was my compass. Does it sound right? Does it feel right?

I’ll fill in the mids to give the piece body and depth, but I’m not always adding a lot of movement there. The upper layers are often where I’ll introduce more of that.

For those parts, I might play for two to five minutes straight without looping or starting over. Maybe it’s a sparse melody, or notes within the scale that feel right in the moment. I play them sparingly, without quantizing them or making them fit a grid.

I talk about that in a bit more detail here in this walkthrough of Pastel Skies:

Then I use automation to give certain sounds more movement. A sound might slowly pan from left to right, or I’ll bring the reverb up and down. Delays can add another layer of motion around the notes.

It isn’t always about adding more notes. Sometimes it’s about letting a sound move, change, or leave enough space for something else to come through.

That’s a bit about my process. I’ll talk more about it in future posts, but I hope this gives you something useful to explore.

Keep Reading

• How I Know When an Ambient Track Is Finished

• The Intention Behind the Music

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