Making Ambient Music With Cherry Audio Synths – Sub-Genres and Development

Some of you may have been surprised to learn that there are so many sub-genres of ambient music. Sub-genres that are actually relatively clearly distinguishable from each other and have specific characteristics.

But things are even more interesting, because some of these sub-genres have undergone quite a remarkable development during the last about 50 years. Dark Ambient from the late 1970s and Dark Ambient from 2025 are anything but the same stuff – not to mention the fact that many of the “Dark Ambient Artists” of the 1970s didn´t even know that their works would be called “Dark Ambient” in later years. And it´s similar with Space Ambient.

The examples in my book – I call them “Projects” in the book - are meant to help you making ambient music, are meant to give you ideas how to start and how to go on with making music in each of the 14 sub-genres. Each Project can be seen as a finished piece of music, but also as a step-by-step guide, and it´s on you, the reader, to decide how strictly you cling to each of these steps, or how far you let your own creativity develop away from the given examples.

Given the above mentioned “historical” development it was and is necessary to create more than only 1 Project for each of the 14 sub-genres. There are 2 Projects concerning Dark Ambient and 2 Projects concerning Space Ambient so far, each representing a different time period.

The next chapter is going to work on the sub-genre of New Age Ambient.

Cheers and peace!

Rolf