> Step by step

1. Creating guitar atmosphere - guitar vs software

1

There’s more than one route to creating a textured, ambient guitar bed. Jacking in our real guitar, and using Logic’s built-in amp and pedal designer, we start to create each element of a lush underbed in turn, beginning with a repeating chordal sequence.

2

Our simple four-chord loop is a bit dry (though we’ve upped the reverb in our virtual amp) but an application of Heavenly Chorus and extra reverb via the virtual pedalboard have helped change the guitar’s tone into something more characterful. We reduce our tempo too, as our original BPM now sounds too strident.

3

We’ve got a foundational chordal loop, which we can use as the linchpin of our ethereal guitar part. We want to add some swelling chords too, to create a sense of gradually evolving movement. In a new track we record ourselves gradually raising the volume knob while hitting an alternative voicing of the same chords.

4

While our bed sounds lusher with the extra element, we want to create some skating lead lines – though we don’t want them to be too ‘melodic’, these elements should accentuate the mood of the bed. Delay is a wonderful effect to play with for this purpose. We lay down some broken arpeggios with a heavy helping of delay, phaser and tremolo.

5

This combination is now sounding suitably soundscapey. In the ambient context we’re working in, it’s often an idea to keep the disparate guitar parts in a similar place in the stereo image. While recording ambient guitar manually can be a journey of discovery, it’s taken us a good hour to create this sound. There’s a much quicker way to achieve lush beds...

6

Audiomodern’s Opacity II allows you to create breathtaking guitar textures via your MIDI keyboard. These sounds were recorded with top tier guitars, effects and pedals and can be customisable in a range of hugely different ways. We load up an instance in a new track and mute the guitar parts we’ve just recorded

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Using our MIDI keyboard, we seamlessly glide between preprepared phrases and melodic fragments. Adding a few more instances of Opacity II, we pepper our ever-growing new bed speedily. That being said, you’ll want to get to grips with the keyboard layout for each Session.

8

With a few tracks of Opacity II’s complementary sessions now laid down, we’ve weaved a superb guitar underbed for our track. Opacity II is just one such example of a time-saving, brilliant sounding suite; there are many more, like Spitfire’s Ambient Guitars. These astounding beds don’t mean you need to hang up your guitar just yet though….

9

A/B’ing our freshly recorded guitar bed and the one made in Opacity II leaves us in no doubt which sounds more pro. But, our track’s central riff is something that we want to add with our real guitar, and with our own playing style. So, here, rather than being a detriment to guitarists, software has sped up a crucial process and enabled us to get on with the fun of making music far quicker.