Make Ambient Like Brian Eno - Generative

How to make ambient music like Brian Eno. Starting with generative ambient, this series of videos will show you how you can recreate the production style of Brian Eno to make your own music. Brian Eno has a long history of generative ambient music. Using chance to drive the firing of notes and create an evolving, ever changing ambient piece. This video shows you how to do this in Ableton Live, using the probability features in the Ableton Live MIDI effects. We use the chance feature on notes to control the probability of them playing, the random MIDI effect to change the note being played, the scale effect to keep all notes within the scale, the velocity random MIDI effect to create a bank of random firing options each time a note is being played. From the apps with Peter Chilvers, Bloom and Trope, to his experiments in modern DAW’s, Eno is always looking at new ways to generate music. ‘Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.’ Eno approaches things from an analytical, conceptual level. He describes himself as a non-musician, more of a conceptual artist. Bowie on Eno ‘you take systems and, in destroying them, you recover the pieces that seem to work and make them into something new. Brian is a born cybernetician. He will take the most unlikely juxtapositions and philosophical ideas and throw them together into this kind of conceptual stew of his and produce this unfathomable, but fascinating animal. And he will continually stop and re-evaluate the work that’s been done and then throw it in an entirely unexpected direction.’ 00:00 Hi 00:27 Generative Techniques 11:44 Expanding the Random 19:02 Playing Out