New age music is a genre of music that has its origins in the late 1960s and has since grown to become one of the most popular genres of music. Largely in the 80’s, it was an important part of music industry. It encompasses a wide variety of sounds and styles and it is characterized by its use of synthesizers and other electronic instruments and some acoustic ones, especially calming flutes or harps. Main goal of new age is relaxation through the long evolving sonic atmosphere, its slow tempo and its dreamy melodies. Using vocals is rare in this genre - especially in tracks of the past.
New age includes other genres within its sonic explorations like ambient music, electronica, neo-classical, jazz and sci-fi alike styles among others. Some notable music artists of New Age are ENYA, Vangelis, Brian Eno, Kitaro, Yanni, Enigma, Mike Oldfield, Jean-Michel Jarre and Mannheim Steamroller.
One of my favorite element in this genre is undoubtedly the sophisticated and state-of-the-art way of sound design with synths.
Emotional pads, futuristic synths, melodic timbres with modulated voices, soft bass drones and calming high frequencies content sounds are some of the defining features of the sounds that being used.
Experimentation is the key for this part. Every tool a synth contains maybe change the sound significantly, sometimes in unexpected ways. I believe that new age is heavily relied in innovative sound design techniques.
In combination with dreamy acoustic instruments - especially the harp of flute for my taste - it gave us (and still doing) some great music tracks.
Vicious Antelope has released tones of new age synth patches. Software synthesizers like Arturia's Pigments, SEM V2, CS-80 V and Jun-6 V, like Spectrasonics Omnisphere 2 and U-He, takes in prophet synths, Repro 1 and Repro 5 synths are giving so many high quality tools to be the componets of fresh and original new age sounds. You can find our synth patches that fit to this fairytale genre here