Lost Reveries

Designed by renowned ambient producer, Hilyard

For over 8 years, Hilyard has been transporting listeners to serene and beautiful worlds with his ambient music. He combines a masterful use of drone-sound-design with subtle compositional elements to create emotion, depth, nostalgia and uplifting melancholy. He has an impressive 25 releases (albums, singles and EPs) on Spotify. For Lost Reveries, Hilyard has drawn from his own sonic palette to create a set of sample-based instruments that allow you to create your own emotive ambient tones.

Hilyard’s work has been part of prominent record labels in the ambient-music world: Stereoscenic and Cryo Chamber. The effect of this type of music has been surprisingly wide reaching as is evident of Cryo Chamber’s 340K YouTube subscribers. You might find inspiration on how to utilise Lost Reveries by listening to the work of Stereoscenic and Cryo Chamber’s artists.

32 Ambient Oscillators

With a typical subtractive synthesiser you might have oscillators like sawtooth, sine or square; in Lost Reveries the ‘oscillators’ are instead sample-based ambient tones. These ambient tones can be shaped using ADSR envelopes, filters and EQ, and layered with other ambient tones. Modulation can also be added using LFOs. Finally, the sound can be coloured using a rack of effects which includes reverb, distortion, chorus and phaser.

The samples are made by Hilyard, who used various tone-generation processes; including both real recordings and synthesisied elements. The end-goal was to create the core elements that you can use to design your own multi-layered ambient tones.

80 production-ready presets

Lost Reveries comes with 80 presets made by Hilyard, and can be easily modified to suit your needs. They’re split into 4 categories: Pads, Plucked Rhythmic Movements and Textures. There’s a simple but effective set of controls for navigating these presets: next/previous buttons, arrow keys support, search, and functions for loading a random preset.

Smooth, pure, rich tones

The ambient-tone ‘oscillators’ are categorised into 4 sections: low, mid, air and vocal. The names of these categories suggest how you might use the tone; allowing you to more easily build multi-layered tracks. The vocal category contains ambient tones that resonate similarly to how the human voice makes various vowels sounds.

The timbral character of these tone are similar to what you will hear in Hilyard’s music. They are pure, smooth and rich: exploring both earthy, dark-forest ambiences and deep space-drifts. You’ll find a spectrum of light/dark, hopeful/hopeless and terrestrial/extraterrestrial.

Great for ambient music, soundtracks, drone and more

You might find Lost Reveries useful for creating music in some of these genres: ambient, drone, cinematic, meditation, music-for-sleep or soundtracks. But that isn’t its limit: we’ve also found that the smooth, semi-organic tones of Lost Reveries layer incredibly well with both real orchestration or as a backdrop for synthesisers.