New Ambience: Monsoon Temple

A remote shrine, nestled in a dense forest. (8 additional versions available for patrons)

Edit Sept. 27, 2025: The Ambience Only - No Chants track had music in it. The correct version has been uploaded. - Tim

Greetings Patrons,

My goal for this piece was to hint (ok, more than hint - let's say obvious nod!) at Asian religious musical themes without making it an overwrought trope. And believe me, it was harder than I thought. I'd come back to it and roll my eyes at some of my decisions from the day before. To rectify this, I used almost no traditional Asian instruments. Instead it's mostly Western and European percussion, chimes, metal percussion, cimbalom, and a deer antler flute from a viking-themed library. In the same way that add the word 'Planet' to many of my SoundPad biomes to unshackle me from realism, this track is equal parts fantasy and even scifi as it is a historical representation.

The ambience is a temple, open on 3 sides, looking out into a forest. It's raining because it's monsoon season, but the monks of the temple are still going about their routines and chanting and lighting candles and shuffling about. Occasionally a large door is opened and is then closed again.

The rain is courtesy of an excellent piece of software that allows me to dial in various parameters for rain and then 'play' them , by morphing between the various conditions using an x-y controller. It's time consuming but it resulted in a constant, subtle movement in the rain that I felt fit the scene well.

As this track is currently in Patreon exclusive sneak-peek mode, I've included the mixed version of the track (live on the site next week), as well as music-only, and ambience-only versions here. Additionally, I created 2 of each 'no rain', 'no chants', and 'no rain, no chants' versions. Hopefully this give a fair amount of flexibility. Without the chants, especially, I don't think we're bound to any particular theme.

Thank you all, as always, for your continuing support.

Best,

Tim

https://tabletopaudio.com