Saturday 30 May 2026 is Drone Day - the annual worldwide celebration of drone music, sustained sounds, and the beauty of the unmoving tone. This mission exists to mark it appropriately.
Theme: To awaken tiny vibrations in your skin and between all your bones (c) International Drone Day
The Mission
Produce a drone recording of minimum 5 minutes duration. Longer is very much encouraged — let it breathe, let it build, let it sit there and hum in your chest.
Deadline Your submission must be posted in this thread before 30 May 2026
What Counts as “Drone”?
For the purposes of this mission, drone music is defined broadly in line with its Wikipedia description:
A recording consisting of sustained sounds, notes, or tone clusters that remain constant throughout a piece, featuring very little harmonic variation. It should emphasise timbre, overtones, and texture rather than melody or rhythm.
Typically, this produces something hypnotic or meditative - but being honest, what comes out of this exercise could just as easily range from the most blissfully relaxed ambient sounds to incredibly loud and abrasive terrorscapes. Both ends of that spectrum (and everything in between) are welcome.
The two guiding principles:
- Awaken tiny vibrations in our skin and between all our bones
- Avoid the dreary tyranny of the melodic
Constraints
- Minimum duration: 5 minutes. No maximum. Go long.
- No restrictions on instruments. Electronic, digital, analogue, sample-based, acoustic, a bowed cymbal through seventeen effects pedals, a sitar orchestra in a cathedral — whatever gets you there.
- No restrictions on gear. Hardware, software, DAW, dawless, a single pedal and a contact mic. All fair game.
- The piece must be a drone as described above. Sustained. Textural. Timbral. Not melodic. Not rhythmic.
- Post your submission in this thread with a short description of how you made it (gear, approach, etc.) - we need to know these things.
Diving further into the “what gear” question. I’ll probably be delving into my own arsenal of drone boxes for this one. But there is absolutely no need to feel excluded if you don’t own one (or several). Great drones are perfectly capable of being produced by conventional synths, guitars, voices, field recordings, or whatever else you have to hand. Drone box nerds like me are just as bad as any other GAS-afflicted subgroup of this cursed hobby, buying unnecessary stuff for bad reasons. You don’t need drone boxes to make drones.
Deadline
Saturday 30 May 2026 - Drone Day itself. When we should gather here and submit to the gods of incredibly slow filter sweeps, badly abused Paulstretch, gaffer taped down keyboards, and whatever other evil deities are summoned by our collective work.
EDIT: Multiple entries
OK, so additional rule. No limit to number of submissions per person. But if you do submit more than one, try to make them notably different in terms of approach/feel/instruments. No spamming the board with 17 recordings of a Grendel Drone Commander doing subtly different types of <(<(<(<(< throb >)>)>)>)>
EDIT: tell us more!
We’ve had loads of great drones on this thread but not much info on how they were created. The mission brief does as for a little info to be shared on how the drone was made - gear, approach, etc. A maximalist approach to this is in this post here - don’t feel obliged to provide quite as much info. But do tell us a bit!
Voting and winners
No voting or winners on this one. Drones are subjective. And the beauty of them is all in the deep immersion not in what floats back to the surface.
If we get enough submissions, and I’m not too horizontal after listening to them, I’ll try to get my shit together and ensure they are collated and posted on Bandcamp, with a link submitted to the official Drone Day website so our collective vibrations are captured and immortalised for ever, and maybe even some cash made for charity.
So: tune low, sustain long, and let it drone.
See you in the hum. 
Mission brief amended accordingly