Building an Ambient loop from scratch…

Let’s put into practice a few of the ideas we’ve talked about and build an Ambient loop in Roland’s JD-XA

01 > Initialise a patch. Remove the oscillators from the mix and build a clicky sounding analogue hat using just filter resonance, sculpting the shape of the hats using the filter/amp envelopes. Record the hats across a 4-bar sequence at 75bpm, then hit play.

02 > Move to an airy sounding digital wave and record in a slow-paced chord sequence with open sounding chords so as not to lock down the tonality too much. Add some long release on the amp/filter envelopes and bring down the filter cutoff to taste.

03 > Copy across your hi-hat track from track 1 to track 4. Bring down the LPF cutoff on the original hat track until the hat morphs into a kick drum. Record your hats in on 16ths. Balance levels across the parts. Next up, it’s bass time!

04 > Make a dual-saw bass, detune one oscillator and drop osc1’s pitch an octave. Record in a b-line that flatters your chords. Soften the kick attack using the amp envelope. Send a temposync’d LFO to amp and filter on the pad.

05 > Add a portamento lead line using a filtered/ resonant saw and effect it using a deep phaser. Make a snare using white noise with low-ish filter cutoff and a long amp release. Record in to complete the beat. Next up, let’s record in an arpeggiated saw.

06 Take a saw wave, make it short/tight and turn on your arpeggiator. Record in a pattern which follows the chords/bass. Add tempo-sync’d delay or auto-panning. Finish off with some lush reverb across the mix and save.