Whisper 10 - Horses

I can't get eighth notes out of my head, so I made an effort to combine a rhythmic eighth note thing, with my more normal ambient sounds. Ambient purists might object to the drums and "rock sound", that's fair, but I just followed my intuition on creating this piece.

The first 30 seconds and the last minute are El Capistan Sound-On-Sound swells, using Em, CM, GM chords. The repeats degrade and fade, and I add some melody notes sparingly.
As for the rhythmic part: the drums are created in Band In A Box, using a blues style at 100 bpm. I created a swelled chords layer, an arpeggio layer, a bass swells layer, and a melody layer. The chords are Em, CM, Am, Bm7b5; 2 bars per chord and then it repeats. As far as Delay/Reverb, I used the El Capistan and the Source Audio Ventris Dual Reverb.
I liberally used panning throughout as I am just beginning to understand that part of mixing. Kenny Gioia's tutorials are incredibly helpful; I took his ideas and went a little crazy with them. The bass layers use an "auto-pan" feature that oscillates the pan slowly left and right. The big bends in the solo start from the right side and swoop through to the left and fade out there. The arpeggios under the guitar solo are panned 20% left; the solo is panned 12% right. That sort of thing.

I created the video from stock (and royalty free) photos and videos from Unsplash.com (thank you very much!) I used photos for all the video except for where the drums and guitar solo are, in which case I used a single video clip of running horses that I really love. I had to loop the clip 3 times or so to get the length correct for the guitar solo. I did watch the video to get inspired to create the guitar solo.
Call it an experiment. My grand-daughter loves it, (she lovingly says most of my ambient pieces are “boring”.)

Here's a link to the YouTube channel: Whisper 10 - Horses