Inject Unpredictability Into Your Atmospheres

Creating textural layers in a mix is fun but you can always go further. If your layers feel a bit too flat, you can use a filter with a random output square or sine wave to add timbral unpredictability to a sound. You don’t need to go from super-dull to super-bright changes – just feeding a little LFO into the cutoff frequency to push tone around a little can help. It’s up to you whether you clock this to the speed of your track. You can do similar things with volume too – SoundToys’ Tremolator plug-in is great for creating bespoke ‘rhythms’ to output ever-changing volume information to keep atmospheres shimmering.