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

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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

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35 thoughts on “How to make ambient samples like its 1998”

  1. Would be neat seeing you reverse engineer stuff from Spectrasonics' Distorted Reality.

    Eric Persing has some pretty cool info about what gear was used to make that sample cd.

    Reply
  2. Dudes throwing out sampling techniques like there's no tomorrow!!
    Errrrr, there is a tomorrow, right?
    Another banger of a tutorial! Crazy how we always want new this, new that, when our simple stock sampler and a few tweaks can lead to this level of creativity, originality, and, FUN!
    Goddamn Bitwig sure is pretty. Ableton is bland by comparison. I admit, I am teetering on the brink of giving Bitwig a go. I am sure a whore, few flashy graphics and I'm ready to jump ship!!! 🙄

    Reply
  3. 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…

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  4. 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.

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  5. 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 😂

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  6. Ha ha this is great. I own most of those and even did some sound design for some of those products. And use them it was very incestuous lol. Good times good times. fuck this is making me feel even older.

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