Except Burial doesn’t use a DAW. But since the OP already has a DAW they can use the built-in audio tools for sample manipulation and FX processing.
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Here’s the very long interview with Burial.
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After relistening to burial early ambient tracks they seem very loop-ey.
Seems like burial is reversing and timestretching several loops without a grided structure to the tracks. I guess a sampler/looper with heavy FX/timestretch could work as a piece of hardware?
Turning off the grid in a DAW-piano roll really helps with getting that loose feeling/vibe
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if you can trade model:cycles for model:samples, you would be pretty much set for making the type of music that you want.
Volca fm2, albeit without interface, is still 6 voices of nice sounds.
which can go into 
korg nts-1 is the king of affordable and diverse FX, great little thing.
and after its properly wet with FX
model:samples can mangle those sounds into delicious ambient.
Minilab 3 can control both, volca and samples 
Fraction of your budget can go into getting a small field recorder, to feed model:samples some non synth textures. (perhaps Tascam DR-05)
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Reaper is excellent for audio editing and manipulation, you can set up your keyboard commands to quickly reverse/normalise/stretch sounds and apply whatever FX you want. I would strongly recommend it over any standalone audio editor at this point, with the exception of software that has hi resolution spectrograph views. Reaper has a spectrograph view and edit mode but the FFT resolution is lacking meaning low midrange and below content is pretty indistinct sadly, it’s still nice to have though and has been useful for quickly finding particular transients.
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Excellent, sound advice. Though for more always-with-you immediacy, the OP could use Koala app that’s already on their smartphone rather than a field recorder.
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Thats a great suggestion! Depends on the phone but some of them sound just as good as a small field recorder.
I struggle with the VOLCA FM2 as I find its sound very “cold”. What I like about burial sounds is that they seem warm, almost organic…
I wonder if this is FX related, or just a mater of sample quality, or layering different textures…
The model:samples seems to be designed as a sample based drum machine, would you say it is good at doing ambient?
I guess I could pick that, or a second hand digitakt (but seems to be a drum machine as well?) Or a sp-404 mkII…
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I’ve always loved my ‘crappy’ mic (and speaker!) on my various mobile phones. I used to have a fairly high-end field recorder with XLR jacks, etc. but found that when I wanted to capture sound in the moment I often didn’t have it with me. For field recordings (in the city at night or in the forest or at the beach) what I’m really trying to record is ‘air’, to get a sense of the vibe of the place and fidelity is not the highest priority.
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one of the great things about all 3lektron boxes is how flexible they are. digitakt for example is labeled as a drum computer but it’s a sampler with flexible envelopes. has nothing really to do with drums specifically apart from the labeling on the trig’s, and the samples it come pre-loaded with. tho it is great as a drum machine.
all ov em can do ambient really well, including model samples.
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Burial’s music sounds the way it does because he’s using a lot of samples from music/games/etc that already has a lot of ambience to it, when you slow that stuff down and put multiple layers of it together you get rich fuzzy harmonics and a nice warm tone, and I think it’s case of smart filtering and frequency bracketing to keep it from getting too muddy. Probably the mastering Hyperdub put it through helps a lot too.
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FM synth programming is entirely its own thing. It is possible to make the Volca FM sound very warm and organic, but it does take learning. The Oscillator Sink series on the subject available on YouTube are excellent. He also offers free patches if you don’t want to take the trouble of programming them yourself.
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Impulse response reverbs are worth experimenting with too, you can get a nice natural sound with those.
Listening back to some of Burial’s stuff he’s definitely making heavy use of filters to roll off top end or cut the lows for different sounds, and bandpassing certain elements to isolate something so it sits just right in the mix -
(Early unreleased track, sadly very low bitrate but that crust probably adds a bit of pirate radio vibe to it tbh).
Also plenty of compression/saturation is essential for warming things up, probably a lot of the sounds he’s using are already fattened due to being in released music/games/film, but if you’re using bits of field recordings you should keep in mind you’ll want a speedy way of doing dynamics control. IMO a good sampler should include a compressor/distortion for this reason.
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FM synthesizers are chilly by nature, both volca and cycles.
Its mostly about clarity and how harmonic the sound is. FM is really good at those so it feels cold.
Try recording a Volca pad that you like into a daw, pitch it down and put a low pass filter on it.
If possible add some noise to it before the filter. If you like what you hear, model:samples can do that + be a drum machine.
Samples and Digitakt are a bit limited in memory capacity, 1gb of storage each, and thats the main reason why they have “drum” in their title. Otherwise they can be anything.
What this means is that you would have to store bulk of your samples on the pc, and only have the stuff that you are working with at the moment, on the device. (transfer from pc to device is easy)
Digitakt has more tools to interact with the sounds + can be a centre piece of whole setup, Samples has more immidiacy/ease of use to come up with ideas quicker + protability.
SP 404 mk2 rocks, but i think from these three devices youd need the most time spent with it for it to click.
There is also 1010music Blackbox, which i really like. Its not immidiate nor flashy, and arranging on it is like reading a book. Id say its the device that can create whole tracks by itself.
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From what I experienced, I really liked the eletron workflow on the Model:cycles, so I would like to keep something close to it instead of having to learn a whole new interface.
I have watched a few digitakt videos and I am very impressed by what that machine can do. It looks like I could do full tracks with it and the nts-1. The model:samples seems simpler but a bit more limited (no resampling?).
But then I stumble upon this
And it is pretty inspiring…
So I guess now it is time to think before buying something.
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there is no best tool, its all subjective. so choose whichever you can afford and that looks most fun to use.
Its really easy to fall into thinking that getting certain hardware will make you sound like people on the videos who are using them, and be dissaponted in the hardware when it doesnt make you a better musician. Especially with samplers, what you put into them, is what you get.
Im sure that with enough skill you would be able to recreate that beat on any sampler that was mentioned in this thread, all of them just have different internal paths to achieving what you want.
but to SP 404 credit, it does has a tonn of great sounding FX to play around with 
Awesome performance, but maybe not everything has been created/edited on the SP-404.
Or SP-404 hero @NearTao has a great video about Ambient and Pads, it could give you a good idea of the workflow.
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I’ll need to revisit this again because firmware 3.0 adds a lot of interesting features that could allow for making more fun things on the mk2. Still wish there was a full wet for reverbs though… can’t help but dream 