Elevator Music: vintage easy listening with a bossa sway

The preview at the top of this page is a separate piece of about 30 seconds, made from the Elevator Music recipe and mastered like the station's tracks, which run longer.

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Elevator Music at a glance

What does Elevator Music sound like?

This is the instrumental easy listening people connect with old hotel lobbies, department stores and, yes, elevators. The station is built on one palette: a bed of lush strings, a warm vibraphone (the metal-barred mallet instrument with a soft, ringing tone), a light cocktail-lounge organ, nylon-string guitar, and a drum kit played with brushes in a gentle bossa nova pattern. It is meant to sound a little dated, on purpose.

The four styles heard most often each bring a different color to the front:

• Bossa lounge with strings and vibes. A bossa nova lounge feel built on strings and vibraphone ("vibes" for short).
• Flute-led easy listening with string swells. A flute takes the tune while the strings rise and fall around it.
• Cocktail organ and brushed bossa kit. The organ steps forward over brushed drums keeping the bossa pattern.
• Seventies store strings with harp glissandi. The sweeping string sound of a 1970s department store, with harp glissandi: quick runs up or down the harp strings.

The tempo runs from 72 to 120 BPM, with a median of 90. The range is wide by design, with room for slow pieces at the bottom and the bossa tracks toward the top. Either way the feel stays light and unhurried, a soft bossa sway, a lazy cha-cha lilt or a slow glide rather than a push. The most common keys are F major, C major, Bb major.

What the station is designed without:

• Anything loud or heavy. No rock, disco or funk drumming. The kit is a soft one, played with brushes.
• Voices. No vocals, singing, humming or choirs.
• Bells, chimes, beeps and alarm-like tones. The warm vibraphone is the only mallet instrument in the palette.
• Minor or tense harmony. The station stays in bright, sweet major keys.
• Famous tunes. The melodies are original, not covers of the easy-listening standards people remember. No vocals, no ads, no commercial recordings.

Original instrumental music, generated and mastered by eleMusic. How the music is made.

Which rooms suit Elevator Music?

The suggestion is the waiting room and the hallways: the parts of the office people sit in or pass through, not the chair. Room by room:

• Waiting room. The station's main home. It gives the front room a definite period flavor while the music stays wordless and the drums stay brushed. The waiting room's device plays the station in its own shuffled order, new each day, and works through the station before starting over, so how soon a track comes back depends on the station's size.
• Hallways. The station's second suggested room. If a hallway speaker sits near an operatory door, set the corridor level with that door open, so the bossa out in the hall does not compete with the treatment room's own station.
• Front desk. Elevator Music is not suggested here, though a desk under the waiting room speakers hears it anyway. The stations page lists the picks suggested for a desk with a speaker of its own.
• Treatment rooms. Not a suggested room for Elevator Music. With brushed drums and tempos up to 120 BPM, it sits at the lively end of the lineup. For the chair, start with the stations at the top of the table below, which have no drums at all.

Elevator Music does not have to run all day: the signed-in owner or office manager can put the waiting room on it for a couple of hours, then take it off again, from the Rooms panel. For more on the front of the office, read our guide to dental waiting room music; for running one device to several speakers, see setting up sound in a dental office. For a hotel, our page on music for hotel public areas suggests starting the lobby on Elevator Music.

When is Elevator Music the wrong pick?

Of the 8 stations, this one has the strongest period flavor. When a room calls for something plainer, look here:

What pairs well with Elevator Music?

Each device plays its own station, so a retro waiting room does not set the sound for the whole practice. Four combinations that keep every station in its suggested rooms:

Mixing stations never changes the price: a plan is sized by how many devices play at once, not by which stations they play. See pricing, how it works, or compare all 8 on the stations page.

Questions about Elevator Music