So you've just seen the Backrooms, or you're drawn to that liminal aesthetic, or both, and you want to inject some of that feeling into your own music. This is a guide on exactly how to do that!

A few artists tap into the liminal sound beautifully: instupendo (huge congrats to him for getting Six Forty Seven featured in the trailer), Oneheart, and C418.
It's a sound I'm always chasing in my own project, Eleftherios.

Now, I'll be honest, I think this one is subjective.
When some people think of the Backrooms, they think scary, horror, tense.
When I think of it, I picture something surreal and otherworldly: the feeling of being between worlds.

Think of walking through an empty shopping centre at 2am, or finding an old childhood photo that feels familiar but slightly wrong.

That's the feeling I'm going to explore in this post.

What Is Liminal Music?

I love the liminal aesthetic. It taps into a comfort I can't quite explain. 

Maybe that makes me weird, but when I stare into those empty Backrooms, it actually makes me feel calm...

Strip away the horror and the monsters, and the core of it is simple: dreamy and minimal, like you've stepped just slightly outside of reality.

In music, you capture that with two things working together:

• Minimal, slow chord progressions that are simple but deeply evocative.

• Dreamy, sine wave based sound design that gives everything that soft, glassy glow.

For this guide, I'm going to pick apart a loop from my sample pack Midnight Ambient - Complete Edition. The loop is called Fading Moon, and you can hear it on the website landing page.

Let's break down how it's built.

Part 1: Melodic Content

Start With a Melodic Theme

When I think of liminal spaces, I think of chords that feel minimal yet evocative. So I like to start tracks with a melodic theme, essentially a chord progression, but played out in melody form rather than as blocked chords.

Here's what the MIDI looks like:

A simple theme like this shapes the entire track. Get this part right and everything else falls into place around it.

Keep the Melody Simple

For the melody itself, going super simple works best for this style. Less is more.

Here's the melody MIDI I'm using:

A trick I love: start the melody on the root key of the track. This track is in A major, so anchoring the melody to that root makes it feel grounded and resolved, even when it's barely doing anything.

Add Arps to Build the Space

Arps are perfect here. They're simple, but they add so much to a loop. They fill the space and create that gentle, hypnotic motion underneath everything.

Here's what my arp looks like:

I'm just playing around the primary notes in the scale of A major (A, B, and C#), which pair beautifully with all the other elements.

Part 2: How To Design Liminal Ambient Sounds

This is where the magic really happens. Sound design is everything with the liminal vibe. Use the wrong sounds and the track will feel completely different, no matter how good the notes are.

Here are the three things I focus on.

1. Movement

With pads, I find the liminal sound almost needs to feel a little uneasy. It needs movement. My favourite way to do this is to put an LFO on the fine tuning. This keeps the sound drifting slightly out of tune, and that subtle instability is a huge part of the liminal feeling.

Here's the pad I'm using in this loop, a Serum 2 preset called Fever Dream from Midnight Ambient:

2. Sine Waves

For melodies and chords, I love sine wave based sound design. The sine wave is just a beautiful, pure tone, but I never leave it bare. I add processing like reverb, subtle distortion, and filtering to give it character, so it has warmth and texture instead of sounding clinical.

Here's the preset I'm using for the main melody theme, called Losing Reality (also in the pack):

3. Processing

Honestly, a lot of the beauty comes from the processing after the sound is made.
A few things I lean on:

• Saturation to make sounds feel more analog and worn down.

• Reverb, and stacking reverb, to make everything feel surreal and dreamy.

• EQ to hone in on what's working. When you're dealing with a lot of reverb, I like to cut the lows fairly aggressively to keep the mix clean and floaty.

Final Thoughts

I hope you've taken something away from this, or at least learned a little about how to make music that fits inside a liminal space. The whole point of this sound is feeling, so trust your ears and chase the mood, not the rules.

If you vibe with this and want a toolkit built specifically for this sound, I think you'll love Midnight Ambient - Complete Edition. It includes the exact presets (Fever Dream, Losing Reality), MIDI, and loops used in Fading Moon and 380+ more sounds designed to capture that dreamy, surreal, between worlds atmosphere.

And I'd genuinely love to hear what you make. If you create something inspired by this guide, send it my way or drop it in the comments below.

Now go get lost in the Backrooms...