Background Ambience And “Good Dirt”

To retain some of the grittiness of The (original) Message and make my remix more sonically interesting, my track needed some “Good Dirt”. I also wanted some continuity so I added a background texture moving through the whole piece that isn’t coupled to the Live Loop scenes.

In accordance with the suggestion to do something bizarre and outrageously unexpected, I recalled MusicTechHelpGuy’s video on converting images into sound with Alchemy. The designers of Alchemy probably imagined budding music producers importing spectral charts of some sort, but there’s no limit to the content of an image file. I thought it would be a great homage to my source material to use the original album cover art for spectral synthesis:

When imported this into the Spectral synthesiser in Alchemy, it looks like this:

I quite like the effect this creates, but it sounded a little harsh in the high frequencies because the album title is at the top in strong contrasting colours, and this translates into a lot of harsh high frequencies. Applying some EQ in Alchemy helped tame these high frequencies, along with some reverb to give it a more ambient feel:

I didn’t want to eliminate the high frequency sounds, which is what a low pass filter would do. I needed a shelf filter and Alchemy doesn’t have one so I added a shelf Channel EQ:

I also added some modulation to the Pan control so the ambient background jumps around on the left/right stereo spectrum to give it more interest:

To trigger the ambient background, I created a four-minute MIDI region in track view playing a single note that triggers the Alchemy synthesiser. This provides a constant, ever changing ambient background which adds “good dirt” to the track independent of Live Loop cells.

This will be a relatively subtle effect when mixed behind the main track, but it definitely adds subliminal sonic interest. Here’s what it sounds like in isolation:

Background Ambience