How to make ambient samples like its 1998

The ambience in games like Silent Hill and Half Life was unmatched. Producers dug deep into old 90s ambient sample CD's to put together their compositions. Let's look at how to create ambient samples like you'd hear in Silent Hill / Half Life and other 90s sample CD's such as Zero-G ambient #musicproduction #bitwigstudio

0:00 Intro
0:25 A bit of history & creative mindset
1:48 How to make 90s ambient samples
2:30 Sample a sound
3:01 Change the pitch
3:52 Resample
4:40 Enable Polyphony
5:35 Drones: Sampling effect tails
7:01 Pitch Modulation (Envelopes)
8:16 Perception Modulation (Panning)
9:07 Continuous Modulation (LFO)
10:42 Randomness
11:20 Let it run & resample
13:05 Finding a drone
14:33 Closing Thoughts

[colonialp]

Feedback loops were also a large contributor to the spooky sounds of packs like Distorted Reality, which was used in games like Silent Hill and other places

[bassboxben]

Paulstretch was a great tool for turning something a few seconds long into an ambient texture that we used bitd.. Great vid btw ;)

[worksofein]

In the late '90's and early '00's we used to make ambient music by sampling stuff like the SH games, and sci fi films etc by recording them from the TV speaker into an old 4 track using a kareoke mic.

We used cheap guitar pedals with the mix/wet set from 85-100% and the feedback at 95% to make "evolving" loops. We would record them for 20 mins then chop out the bits we liked and spliced them into a final track.

[svartsjokolade]

A great tool for this is also paul's extreme sound stretch, it's a lot of fun to slow things down massively. Great video!

[synthphilosophy]

I didn't think reliving the 90's was so achievable until I discovered your work. The sounds you create in this one gives me some good ol' perfect dark vibes. Those type of sounds are their own thing and it's such a fun to create those. Thanks to your tutorials I have a much better understanding of how these were created and the different techniques behind it. This is awesome, keep it up please. (Oh and; I love my tr rack, and I bought it because of your videos. And suddenly I now have a rack next to my desk that is filling up with vintage gear. And it's so much fun) Thank you.

[Hazel]

Easily one of my favorite production channels. Incredibly easy to follow even though I'm not a Bitwig user.

[JesseBakerH]

13:42 this sounds like something straight out of silent hill and I mean this in the most complimentary way possible. awesome video.

[tx]

The best thing about being middle-aged is I lived through the 80s and 90s music scenes....Not saying some modern music isn't great, it is, but nothing like those decades. It also amazing that many young people are discovering music from decades ago...

[Pachinko]

I don’t even have a professional DAW but these videos are so entertaining

[VirtualModular]

Top video! I'm always saying sampling is underrated as a creative technique. I constantly sample and resample sounds. One of my favourite workflows is to create weird modular textures in VCV, dump out some audio then edit and load bits into Arturia Pigments. Endless retro ambient pads 😂

[Lu_Lap]

I love your videos. You really REALLy need to make a video explaining how to reproduce the famous PS2 intro sound. It definitely was done with wavestation and/or triton, and I have no doubt you are, right now, the person in the world who knows the best how to proceed to do such types of sounds. Seeing the current comeback on PS1-rallye house and nostalgic jungle music booming on soundcloud, you will really realize a public service at that point !

[MonkeyVideoClub]

One of the things like to do is take a sample from any old movie, particularly a bit with a lot of overlapping dialogue (like a party scene or something) and then slow it down and pitch it down a couple octaves till its realll slow, and duplicate that then reverse the duplicate and put it over the original, then add a huge reverb, then do that that process a couple times with varying pitches and octaves till i get a weird cascade of gargly alien sounding voices

[RJ_Eckie]

This is so freakin cool! I was looking into “the PS1 sound” and already downloaded some of the original sample libraries, but this goes all the way to the source! I like working in hardware and with just the BlackBox, the Torso T-1 sequencer and a reverb I think I can apply all of these techniques. Noice!

[Fogst]

I watch your channel like Discovery channel when I was kid. Really interesting stuff for sound geeks

[blxnk]

you always release a video when i need it, love it as always.

[XingoMusic]

thats awesome, your knowledge is awesome as always bro

[Imaninternetuser]

I love these old sample CDs, back in the day you used to have a hard copy!. I actually have quite a few of them incl. Jungle Warfare 1-3 they're awesome.

[remilaud]

fuckin love you for this bro, this is exactly what i was lookin for!

[Matthewsavant]

The Octatrack is phenomenal at this, as is the Amiga. Also the Waldorf iridum when using the granular engine can take it to another place.

[davidmcgirr]

Outstanding, always inspiring to spend time making building blocks