thanks lars, but i’m okay. i did stay inside for about two months. my wife works in a grocery story, so being essential she kept working and brought the groceries home. things are much better now, and in fact i started going in to work again since yesterday. we’re waiting on the local government to give the go ahead, but my students will probably start school again on april 20.
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this is the second in a series of small, one-voice patches in vcv rack.
i’m using a very similar setup as in the first installment. i’ve changed out the oscillator for a phase distortion based one, and radically changed the envelope and the tempo. so we get a very different sound.
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the third part of my in isolation series of small, one-voice patches in vcv rack
this one is very minimalist and quite abstract, with many soft passages. headphones recommended.
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Très étrange 
I can’t get the hang of minimalism and ambient. I always put too much stuff into things. Like, “hmm, not much is happening here, people will get bored, maybe put some more chords in?”
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i just make the music i like. i’m in a niche genre, so i don’t see much point in trying to please “the people” (as if they all have the same taste)… luckily, some people do like it, and some are even willing to send me a few dollars.
also, if i like it, chances are that some people who are as crazy/eccentric/etc as me will also like it. if not, that’s fine too. i enjoy what i’m doing, and that’s what counts for me.
and sometimes you just need to take the risk and try something different. experiment, see if it works. at least to me, that’s what modular is about.
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I agree with this but my thought process is always the same. I decide that I’m going to do a minimalist kind of thing (just to try it) and then I just can’t stick with it.
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I’m a big fan of ambient too, 
and your stuff really corresponds the ‘‘brian eno definition’’. I do love the less minimalist ambient that Omri, or that i tend to make, but the more minimalist style is also perfect in some situations, like reviewing for university, or just having something to listen too that will not take too much concentration to enjoy 
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This is very close to Brian Eno’s actual definition of ambient 
AMBIENT MUSIC
The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces - familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.
Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.
An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.
Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think.
Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
BRIAN ENO
September 1978
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I’ve seen quite a few videos and interviews with musicians lately where they say essentially the same thing. A particularly bright individual suggested the theory, that when a musician is performing his/her sense of time starts to deviate from that of the audience, even if none is present, and the impulse of many musicians is to make the music more busy than it should be. So the discipline is to slow down, stretch things out, and to “sit on one’s hands” before introducing the next element. I think I agree with this theory and have already experienced it myself, and so I suspect that trying to produce slow ambient is a great cure for one’s inner ADHD and training for producing what is actually most rewarding for the audience, at the same time.
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Love that sound Ben! Those two plugins with phase-distortion oscillators are so unique, and sound so damn good, I love 'em. As far as I can tell they’re the only ones of their kind in Rack, they’re not in the library and I really hope they’re not going to fall completely by the wayside in the future. Somebody rescue them officially, pleeeaaaaase…
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this is the fourth in a series of small, one-voice patches in vcv rack.
an even smaller patch, with just three modules: marbles (generating pitch and rhythm), rings (sympathetic string oscillator), and plateau (lush plate reverb)
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I often make patches like this, and leave them running for hours, when I’m trying to decide about a voice, and it’s often quite satisfying. Something in the soul loves [good sounding] minimalism…
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exactly. i would say i’m more a sound designer, rather than a composer. i love letting patches like this go for a long time, making small tweaks from time to time, until i’m satisfied and record a snapshot of it.
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I have the same experience sometimes. When my friend came to me to compose a long ambient piece he could fall asleep to, he gave me a Steve Reich piece as an example. Of course, I wasn’t content to just let the slow running 7th chords with plenty of reverb be enough. I added a faster melodic line with delay and then a bass line. When I presented the piece to my friend (which I was quite proud of), he panned it. Told me, it needed to be simpler. So, I stripped off the melody line. He came back and said simpler, so I stripped off the bass, but I left in some delay. He, being a composer/producer himself, picked out the delay immediately and said to get rid of it. Anyways, a humbling experience in creating minimalism.
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That’s a good story but it sort of makes me wonder about minimalism itself. Surely there’s a tendency for minimalist music to all be basically identical?
edit: thinking about it that sounds really negative. What I mean is that the less elements there are in a piece of music the smaller the number of possible combinations.
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Yes… and no. Yes in the sense of less variation, but no in the sense that, if you strip something down to the bones, even the slightest variation represents an entirely new universe (deep, I know 
).
Ok, this calls for more explanation. You can have a fella make a really minimal piece, just the skeleton of a melody or a phrase. And you can have a fella take that, and make a rich embellishment of that, with all the horns, strings, choirs and pieces imaginable, and you would think that an audience would think - wow, this is an entirely new and wonderful piece, but they wont, because they recognize that it’s just a garnish upon the core structure, and they will say that it’s the same piece just with more garnish on it, even though there might be a thousand voices of difference. See? The difference is not in the thousand voices, the difference is in the core of the simple [minimalistic] melodic structure. Therefor, at the core, even a couple of notes changed in a melody is a complete departure, a completely new landscape, just waiting to be filled out.
Just another way of saying: Perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to strip away, I suppose…
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there are two considerations i want to put forward.
one, by stripping down to the bare bones, you can focus in much more detail on subtle variations and notice things that would more easily get lost in a busier piece. (basically what lars said above.)
two, music can be experienced in different ways. and especially ambient is often meant to not draw attention to itself, but function more like a sonic wallpaper, setting a mood, aiding in meditation or even sleep. then having a smaller number of variations is a good thing.
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It’s also interesting to look at ambient’s cousin, minimalism. I like this documentary series
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This one is a perfact example at the current state of discussion to state that a minimalistic approach allows to fill the gaps individually.
I can let my mind float. What at first earpeak seems to be random tunes is set according to tact, so the mindflow suffers no disturbance from running against the clock impressions.
However if I seek for distraction by having something more ready prepared (the more layers you get with a piece the less gap filling you have to do) minimalistic ambient can feel like a burden.
At present state I am very happy to have a low signal flow piece at hand to calm down for a few minutes.
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