I'm trying to create a Funeral Doom(ish)-piece and I can't get it to sound "Funeral" enough. It sounds to "doomy" like Electric Wizard-stuff or something like that. Someone have any tips? What tuning do you think I should use? (I'm using D-tuning now). How do you do when getting inspiration?

I know exactly what I want but it's just something that is missing....

I'm not an expert in this, but I kind of tackled this area slightly with one of my own albums and learned a few things.

Much of the funeral feel has to do with both the sound texture and the structure actually. The texture usually is a bit blurry or "ethereal", just requires some fiddling with effects I guess. Going low with the tuning can help, could maybe go even as low as B (which is my favorite tuning) but maybe that's not a viable option for you (depending on the strings you have). A more subtle usage of distortion probably works better than extreme distortion, but there are exceptions. The scales used is probably the biggest element. If your stuff ends up sounding like Electric Wizard, you're probably not playing in the appropriate key. Funeral doom is almost always in a minor key, which achieves the depressive/sad feel quite automatically. Try playing around with some octave chords as well. Also, funeral doom usually has very subtle or almost stealthy progressions, so if you're trying to evolve the song too fast it ends up sounding rushed which obviously destroys the funeral feel (one of the reasons these songs are usually very long).

There's also a method (I don't know what it's called) where you play chords by changing only one note from the previous chord. It achieves a nice dissonant feel if you do it right. Depressive black metal also uses this type of thing a lot but at a different pace of course. This is a comedy video, but if you skip to 3:15, it's where he does this thing I'm talking about. When you do this with chords "modified" from a power chord for example and then add the actual power chord in the right place, the progression can end up sounding really massive.

I'm really bad at explaining these things in musical terms though because I never studied music theory.

Oh, and if you've made something we could listen to, that would probably be very helpful and allow for more precise tips.

Thank you, you gave me a few things to have in mind, I will try tune down even more and try out some octave chords and that last thin you talked about. It sounded cool Maybe I also have to think a bit about the progression.