i posted this rant there, but here it is here too now:
http://createdigitalnoise.com/viewtopic.php?t=153
re making drones from acoustic sources heres a few approaches i find a good starting point
- record acoustic source sounds with long natural decays, specifically to reverse them
eg guitar or piano (with sustain pedal down), play & record long sustained notes or chords
let them sustain out to nothing...
reverse them in whatever sample editor you use & then lay lots of them out
so that you never actually get to the original start (now the end) of the file
ie automate volume so as it builds backwards to a climax u turn it down
& cross to another backwards chunk starting....
these can be harmoncially rich depending on the notes in the chords etc
but esp pianos do very nice things towards the end of their decay
esp if u gently release the damping pedal... almost get a surge of harmonics...
- use granular plugins to randomise acoustic sounds
i mainly use GRM Tools Freeze and GRM Tools Shuffle
these can becoema bit static as there is no harmonic development,
but to counter that i add a couple of EQs & modulate their frequencys
slowly so the drones evolve harmonically..
- there are a few softsynths that are really built for droney ambient sounds
& i own & use a couple of them eg chameleon 5000 and ambient keys (both OSX VST)
but i tend to be wary of how i use them as they both have 100s of beautiful fully built
droney textures in them as presets & if u want to be one of the generic myspace me-toos
then just dial one of them up & as uncle brian says hold down one note
i do use these softsynths but i tend to try & find very simple starting points
eg a soft resonant pad
& then trial & error find the fader or knob that adds a nice harmonic variance
& in real time record a big drone of it while intuitively varying the tone....
& then recontextualise the result...
- playing the spectrum of acoustic sounds is fun
load a nice harmonically rich sound & do a spectral analysis i mainly do this in kyma or metasynth
then resynth it using only some parts of the spectrum
with the kyma u can step thru playing/freezing bits of the spectrum
and its very nice for band limited tones/drones eg only use the upper frequencys
- impulse reverbs are an interesting way to create drones, the obvious way of
applying infite reverbs (eg i love the MARS IR for Altiverb)
but also less obviosuly using non-real IRs eg use a piano sustained chord
as an IR & then convolve it with other droney sources...
I personally rarely come up with one drone that is complete, occasionally but not often....
my nicest drones tend to be 2 or 3 or 5 layers, none of which all play loudly at the same time...
but that all depends on what kind of drones you are making, aesthetically?
eg dense and/or noisy and/or quiet and/or pure and/or harmonic and/or whatever....
a friend has an E-Bow which is fun to play with on strings - guitar, piano etc
but so are lots of things out in the real world... it makes me smile to think of how
many people really sweat it trying to do everything in their laptop....
if they turned it off for a while & looked & listened to whats around them in the real world
it might actually do their creative ears a lot of good... but to each their own....
FWIW i spent a fun few hours the other day dropping marbles on to the strings of a baby grand piano
with the sustain pedal jammed down & then started muting strings to control which strings
could sustain with bits of cloth.... same with using an old violin bow on bits of metal, cymbals etc
& dont get me started about what you can do with contact mics & resonant objects
or i wont get any work done today!
) 
