It’s slightly amusing reading this after the fact of this thread but here you go. An actual starter kit.
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As mentionned before, a used Microfreak might be a good choice. I think it’s more suited for gnarly/damaged textures à la Burial rather than deep/lush ambient pads.
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It is funny that so many people try to do these beats when these are really just ukg beats with unconventional samples instead of normal drums.
I am more curious about his ambient techniques… Especially because it seems like these shifted from early release to his new ambient stuff which I don’t like nearly as much when it comes to textures.
Considering how close we are to the big synth events, I think I will just wait a few weeks and save extra money before committing to buying anything.
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Maybe change the thread title to ‘Budget ambient sampler’?
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(What’s) been implemented in Audacity? Lotsa names in this thread.
There is a very basic version of Paulstretch in Audacity. The full version in both standalone and VST forms has been linked in this thread:
Although Audacity’s UI is a bit idiosyncratic, I doubt that there is much that could be done in 2006 in SoundForge that can’t be done in Audacity in 2023. If you need batch processing, there are various OSS command line audio processing tools that should be available for Mac/Windows/Linux.
OP wants hardware, but for others who want to do the Burial thing authentically, Audacity and a large pot of coffee should do the job.
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This 
You need filters/eq to get those sounds. Lots of Burial’s pads are bandpassed & the top end is rolled off on a lot of the sounds for that ‘listening through the wall’ feeling. He also puts lots of rain/crackle samples all over the place, which helps with that grainy atmosphere.
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I’ve been playing with an old Akai CD3000XL which I’ve borrowed from my Dad, it’s not one of the 12 bit ones which have a particular lo-fi sound but I still really love the subtle saturation and artifacting you get with it. I certainly couldn’t recommend someone go and try to use one these days though, trying to set things up through the crazy menu structure is a nightmare though I’m sure with practice I could get fast with it. I still haven’t figured out how to apply an envelope and keytracked filter to a sound, think I need to load sounds from floppy disk or CD-ROM into a program or something. Also it’s vast, I have absolutely no space for it on my desk so I’m doubtful that I’m going to be using it in my setup tbh.
I did some comparisons with my Octatrack and was surprised to hear that the playrate shifting sounds basically identical, to the point where I’m thinking they must share some hardware or algorithms. I just wish the OT had per-track polyphony…
Here’s a bit from some old film that I sampled ages ago that I’ve been using to compare Akai/OT/VST samplers. This was with the CD3000XL, any good VST sampler can do the same kind of thing though, just cleaner usually. 1st is standard speed, then 7 semitones down, an octave, two octaves, and finally three octaves below standard pitch -
As you can hear, each time you slow a sound down you start to get a very different mood and texture from different parts of it. If you use your imagination you could take any section from the super slow one and turn it into a really interesting pad or bass sound. Filtering and layering of multiple samples like these is the key, artists like Burial use many such sounds all carefully placed in the frequency+time spectrum to reach the overall effect.
For practicality and usability’s sake I’m almost certainly going to have to stick to a VST sampler controlled by hardware, I’m considering TAL-Sampler which has some emulation of the dirt in early hardware samplers like the Akai S1000 and some nice saturation. I couldn’t get the really slowed down sound to match the Akai/OT’s aliasing or whatever it is artefacts though.
(At 13:52 he demos a classic sounding pad he made with it, a good example of what you can do with a sampler)
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This actually sounds like a pretty neat setup! I listened to the Ico soundtrack track because I really want to play that game again someday. It sounds like some rompler or sampled vocals with a lot of super big reverb on it plus a nice sampled chime rack. Fortunately for you, you have the NTS-1, so you should be able to get some nice reverb on that to process your other stuff with.
A fun trick for drones/textures on the Volca FM is to unlock the extended tempo range and turn it all the way down, then get an arp going and start playing with the attack/decay knobs for the modulator and carrier. Try some different patches (evolving pads are a good place to start) and super long attack times for the modulator or carrier. This can be really good with algorithms 19-32. You can even change the algorithm while the drone is going.
You have some neat options to expand your guitar rig to make some cool textures, too, like using an Ebow or sustain pedal and putting that through some reverb. Or you could build layers using a looper pedal.
Doing stuff on the computer can feel a lot like real work, but I feel like a lot of these mysterious textures, at least when I do them, require a lot of layering and resampling. I’ve actually tried to figure out how to do some of the stuff I am making using hardware and it adds up pretty quickly. Plus in a lot of cases I’d have to record and stretch it and send it back out to hardware for another round or two anyway, which seems like a big hassle. So like others have said, don’t be too afraid of the box.
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Free vst software is your best bet
Korg wavestate is also a beast when it comes to ambient. It’s a bit over your budget (probably around 450€ on reverb) and is quite complex to program, but possibilities are … endless
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I think I am going to wait a bit to try and find something that feels inspiring to use rather than just sounds good, otherwise it would be best to stick to VSTs as a lot of people have mentionned here.
If you manage to get a digitakt. You’ll never regret it. The sample manipulation you can get out of that box is incredible. Save for it.
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Yes, it is such a versatile machine. From ambient generator to techno groovebox…
Looping some long samples, pitched down, some dist/srr/bitred, filtered and drenched in digitakts delicious reverb and delay should get you into ambient-heaven pretty quickly…
…especially now you can add random sound fx with slice machines combined with random lfo’s and trig probability.
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Just discovered this exists, Akaizer -
Which can produce some really nice textures that could be cut up and played in a sampler -
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Yeah, it’s a nice counterpoint to Paulstretch.
I still need to find a friend with an Emu Ultra or similar aliasing rack sampler, or find a way to pass someone a few bucks to downpitch samples for me.
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I personally have a Digitakt, but that’s twice the OP’s budget. The Liven Lo-fi, on the other hand, ticks all the boxes:
Under €300
Hardware
Samples and resamples
Effects
Amenable to long pads/drones (not [only] percussion-oriented)
Check out this short ambient video of someone using only a couple of found sounds in their kitchen, I really dig the underlying melody:
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sounds so warm 
And looks easy to use, maybe you found my next instrument …
Not that it’s a competition or anything but I did post that exact video in this thread a week ago 
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