SAMPLING in Video Game Music

So, what do people mean when they say SAMPLING in video game music Well, you may be familiar with how some games, like EarthBound sampled various pop songs, taking little pieces of them to become intruments or sounds in the game. This is much like how sampling is done in "normal" or non-VGM music. But there's another kind of sampling you may not have thought much about that I think is really cool... Think about this: Have you ever wondered about the normal instruments you hear in these games? Wh

ere... did these sounds come from? These iconic instruments that bring us nostalgia... That musicians STILL go back to use. These pianos, drums, cats and dogs must come from somewhere, right? And then what changed when it came to the latter disc-based consoles? You know, when video game music began to sound more real? Or hell, what about the origin of these damn pot breaking sounds? OH- Why did games sometimes SHARE samples? WHY is this GODDAMN fRENCH HOrN EVERYWHERE?????? EVERYWHERE??????? EVER

YWHERE???????? EVERYWHERE????????? EVERYWHERE?????????? EVERYWHERE??????????? EVERYWHERE???????????? EVERYWHERE????????????? EVERYWHERE?????????????? To answer these questions, let's talk about how games transitioned to using samples in the first place. And if you learn a thing or two from this video, leave a like! My channel is still pretty small, so, anything helps! Back in the day, music was implemented NOT through pre-recorded audio files like your .MP3s or .OGGs but as teeny tiny files cont

aining musical instructions that told the console's musical instructions that told the console's soundchip what to play. All through a limited number of channels to host the sounds: Sounds kind of complicated, but this just means old systems played each note in real time, processed by their soundchips. We call this "SEQUENCED" music implementation as opposed to "STREAMED". And on these old consoles, the sounds we heard on them were self-produced. synthesized by their soundchips. Stuff like your

square waves, triangle waves, ;) noise, *Mario Bros. Level 1-1 drums* and this stage of gaming history, REALLY limited sampling... From NES: "GHOSTBUSTERS" AVGN: "What the (meow) was that!?" See, it was possible to include audio samples on some systems... but this rarely happened due to how much space they'd take up on a cartridge, even after compression. So usually, the most we'd get were a few drum samples here and there! Similar could be said about the Sega Genesis... Even if it was a 16-bit

console, its soundchip was much more in line with the NES than the SNES as it used mostly onboard synthesis for its melodic instruments. Though it was slightly better than the NES at using samples. Which is why you hear them more often in Genesis games. Michael Jackson: Ooh! You could say that when it came to sampling... it was a... bit better! AVGN: HA AVGN: GET IT? AVGN: A AVGN: BIT AVGN: BETTER? Skip ahead a few years to when more powerful consoles hit the scene... *explosion* They had a much

greater ability to well... Sample! Their soundchips evolved from primarily being their own synthesizers to primarily using sample data! Recorded by the composer and stored on the game cartridge. So! As composers moved over to working on these new systems, they naturally began creating their own instrument samples by taking audio recordings of their real equipment! Vocal samples were a thing now too. "The last metroid..." "is in captivity." (Ryu dies) Well, in a way that didn't sound AS deep fri

ed as- "GHOSTBUSTERS" "PIKA" Jesus Christ!! This sound from the beginning of the video: was actually the voice of Etsuko Kawano. She's credited right here at the end of the game for it! Stream Toffee: That is ALSO the voice of Undyne! Nintendo would end up getting real creative with their vocal samples. Uh, delightful. Okay, well anyway! When it came to the actual instruments that composers put into these games, You know, like the pianos, strings, guitars uh- ... Just you wait. There was one VER

Y common way they got sampled. From MIDI modules! See, look! here's a young Koji Kondo with some. Same goes for Nobuo Uematsu. And Yoko Shimomura to name a few. Pretty much every game composer at this point was using them. (Crowd Gasp) But if you were like me, you're probably confused about what these things even are! You connected these devices to other things that could also communicate via MIDI. Like an electric keyboard or synthesizer! Which you could then USE to play the instruments on the

modules! Put simply, they were kinda like VSTs before VSTs were a thing... Except that they were physical hardware instead of digital software. Connecting them to PCs worked too, for playing back MIDI content... Or even... Gaming! PC games that were old enough to support MIDI also took advantage of these devices. so that means if you were playing DOOM on your old MS-DOS computer... instead of getting audio like this: you'd get audio like this! TL;DR, they introduced much higher quality instrumen

ts to anything capable of connecting to them. And it was these things, These... MIDI sound modules that got sampled in video games for so many years to come. And to demonstrate what I mean, uh, listen out for this... French horn. You might have heard it around before. I thought I only recognized them from Pokémon, but turns out, they're (meow) EVERYWHERE. As you can imagine, if a game is using one of these sounds, you can bet that some other ones from the same module were used in the soundtrack

too. Lemme just load in the orchestral drum kit here and... OK, so let's check some less obvious examples like this piano... (editing mistake please dont look AAA) (editing mistake please dont look AAA) I knew I just showed you a bunch of examples from Roland, but it wasn't just limited to them. Some of my favorite music box samples came from these things... And switching. Hold on a sec. I already talked about the Undertale music box a while ago in this video. It was from a soundfont called SGM!

While that is exactly what Toby Fox used, it turns out that some soundfonts get their samples from MIDI modules. To give you an idea of how crazy things can get, This music box sound: Was originally from this set of floppy disks released around 1986. You put them in this Roland S-50 sampler synth thing via the... ... Floppy slot...? to get the sounds! I'm assuming this was then resampled across other Roland hardware like the SC-55 and then again on the XV-5080. And that was the specific one sam

pled in SGM, the one Toby Fox used. How many layers of sampling are we at now? Also hey, check out this flute sound I found from those floppy disks I just mentioned! (Clueless) Pretty cool, right? These findings and more can be found in the VGM sound sources spreadsheet. So credit to all the contributors there, as well as their Discord. They'll be in the description. People even go as far as to find all the source instruments for a game like Mario 64 and make restored versions of their soundtrac

ks. To hear what they'd sound like with no console limitations! Pretty cool, albeit a little uncanny... So you just had a bunch of examples of samples that were in games. Let's talk about how they were actually implemented! Regardless of what was recorded to be sampled, the caveat was how to fit this audio information into cartridges... Recording every note across a keyboard, for example, would take up far too much space on a game. So what did they do? Well, these consoles were able to change th

e pitch of a sample across the entire range of a keyboard! So you didn't actually need more than one recording from the source instrument. They'd compress it to reduce file size, making it sound like potato quality in the process... And there you have it! It was finally ready to be thrown in the game and used as an instrument! But wait... Sampled instruments from the SNES, N64, GBA, etc could look like this: They got cut so short that they usually never lasted longer than a second. But in-game,

they could sound like this. These notes definitely sound sustained, so what gives? So this is actually one of my favourite tricks that was used alongside compression to conserve space... Loop points! Let's look back at that sample. We'll put the starting loop point here, and the ending loop point right there. That's it! That's how it was done. Hmm, this still sounds kind of abrupt though. A AD ADS ADSR ADSR, are definitely letters! No, they stood for attack, decay, sustain and release. You may h

ave already seen me mess with these in my video about UNDERTALE's music, but you should also know that these were settings in old consoles too! For simplicity's sake, we're only going to look at attack and release for now, because they're the most important ones. Raising the attack. Now it fades in. Raising the release. It smoothly fades out. LOOP POINTS in combination with ADSR are what created a are what created a sort of illusion that these were full-bodied samples. Game instruments were able

to sound pretty close to the original sampled instruments this way, but with the ability to make notes as long as they needed to be at no extra cost of file space. This video was initially supposed to be five minutes. Oh hey, Vinny's calling! You have a frog?? Toffee: Vinny, do you want to put the frog in my video? Vinny: Yes. 🥺 Toffee: This frog gets to be in the video for no reason now. Vinny: Hell yea Both: OH- Anywho, this development made it much more likely for individual games to have u

nique sounding instruments instruments or sound samples. some sounding completely different from one another! Unlike the NES's... Leading into consoles like the N64, things remained mostly the same in terms of how composers would implement music. However, and this kind of blew my mind when I found out, the N64 was actually able to play streamed music, like how newer consoles would! As you can hear... the issue with this was that the songs had to be incredibly compressed to fit in a game. So much

so that the loss in quality just... wasn't worth it. Guy from N64 AD: "WOAH I'M OUTTA HERE" In the end, composers mostly stuck to the tried and true instrument samples method! Same as the SNES. That being said, this was the beginning of the rise of sample CD usage in VGM. But hold on, we're not there yet. As even more time went on... consoles that could really handle streaming came around! "streaming" being playing entire songs in the form of audio files. This is what I meant when I said music

began to sound more REAL in this era. Because it did! You could even put a whole rap song in these... Okay, okay, slow down. You'd think this would be when all composers would start using streamed music as opposed to sequenced, right? You know, because everything was on discs now. Well, that's actually kind of a misconception. Looking at the PlayStation 1, despite the games being on discs which were fully able to handle CD quality audio, composers remained sequencing music for the most part! Aga

in, notes being played live using sampled instruments. And as a result, a lot of PlayStation 1 music sounds a lot more in line with SNES music, as it was essentially the same method. This was because sequencing music was still great for conserving space, even on discs. But I'm guessing for some cases that it was just what composers were used to, so they stuck with it. For a lot of these games, streamed music was often limited to intros and cutscenes. Whereas the rest of the OST would likely be s

equenced. It was like this on the N64 sometimes, too. On the PS2, pretty much all games used streamed audio outside of a few that still sequenced their music. Final Fantasy X and X2. Oh my god, there it is again... And Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2! Wait, oh my god, these... these drums are also everywhere! When it came to Nintendo's GameCube, most third-party companies shifted to having fully streamed audio in their games... but Nintendo themselves didn't want to move on just yet! Games like Mario Sun

shine, Luigi's Mansion, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, Animal Crossing, and both Pikmin games all used sequenced music. Hell, the Wii menu is also sequenced using a simple sine wave. To be fair, it was much harder to tell what was sequenced and what wasn't at this point, as the sample and quality in consoles had increased drastically since the PS1... You may be wondering though... What did happen when companies made the switch to streamed music? Was this when game companies started recording liv

e instruments for their soundtracks? Like, real instruments playing full songs in a studio... or even an orchestra? No. That would be incredibly expensive, even for triple-A devs. Though much of what you've heard may sound like live playing... It very often isn't. High-quality music plugins just sound that good. That is the actual bass used throughout Persona 5. A plugin from my computer. I mean, some games would have an intro cutscene or other small parts with a real orchestra like how every Sm

ash Bros intro since Melee's has been recorded by a live orchestra. But for pretty much everything else... Mostly samples. In the modern day, most instruments you hear in VGM are virtual instruments. Or samples from those MIDI modules in their highest quality. And this all makes sense, because VSTs and samples can sound as authentic as the real thing to the average listener. So why pay for an orchestra when your computer can do it all? And if you're looking for a more human element, it's extreme

ly common for VGM composers to specialize in one or a few real instruments. So they might occasionally record some of those for the game while doing everything else with samples. The main composer of Persona 5, Shoji Meguro, played guitar over many of the tracks as he's a guitarist. Kinda similar to Mother 3, as Shogo Sakai also sampled his guitar to be used within the soundtrack. It's likely he's the one playing guitar in Melee, too. Semi-related fun fact about UNDERTALE... it was mostly compos

ed with free samples and soundfonts, all except for the songs "She's Playing Piano", "Last Goodbye", and "Undertale". Probably the most emotional song in the whole game... This is in large part thanks to Stephanie MacIntire, who played real acoustic guitar for it, with Toby playing his usual sampled SGM instruments behind it. Using real instruments in VGM isn't something that doesn't happen entirely. It's more often than not just included where it counts... whether it's an indie game or a big-bu

dget AAA game. So yeah, at this point, composers shifted over to using DAWs for normal computers rather than trackers. Okay, are you still with me? Because it's now that I finally get to talk about my ENTIRE reason for making this video. I was just casually listening to a Kikuo song, and something occurred to me. Holy (meow), Sonic Heroes? Yeah, so post-SNES era was when licensed sample libraries, specifically sample CDs, began to see a ton of usage. Like super wide usage across all the big gami

ng companies. Don't get me wrong, sample CDs were used pre-N64 era for sure. I just meant that their usage skyrocketed after this point. They were collections of sound samples that could consist of instrument sounds, vocals, ambience... drum sounds and loops, and of course, sound effects such as pottery destruction. I should mention that some of these CDs had to be inserted into these CD samplers, which then functioned like those MIDI modules, except you had to swap out discs for different sound

s. Like it's kinda crazy how much they were used? Some songs were genuinely just a couple loops from these sample libraries, thrown together with some finishing touches. Sort of like how modern day beat making works, if that makes any sense... God, I love Devil May Cry. Due to the popularity of many of these CDs, you'd sometimes recognize some samples being shared across different games. or even different forms of media. You could be in the middle of watching an episode of Bill Nye the Science G

uy and... Oh no. So, what's the takeaway from all this? other than a greater understanding of how video game music has been produced over time? Well, I feel like everything in this video explains how SiIvaGunner rips are a thing, so there's that... lol idk There's just something so cool about growing up with these games, admiring their music for such a long time, and then hearing all the individual puzzle pieces used to make them. I can definitely understand if it takes some of the magic away fr

om them for you though So if that's how you feel, my apologies. For me though, knowing these exact pianos, synths, and drums of these songs makes me feel a lot more... grounded? less left in the dark? The thing about VGM is that we usually have very little insight on the creation process of so many of these songs. That and the fact composing for games has generally been seen as a background thing, and maybe even seen as less worth documenting than other things. But hopefully that's changing. Let

me know what your favorite example of sampling is in the comments. I read all of my comments, and would genuinely love to hear about it. You can also come talk about it in my new Discord server! I'm trying to build a welcoming and cozy community there, so feel free to join! :D and maybe even post your own music or art. If you want to watch me play games, I'm a Vtuber over on Twitch. I want to give a huge shout-out to Andrew Cunningham for having me on his channel recently. I was on his most rec

ent video about where W.D. Gaster's theme can be found in Deltarune's OST! So go check that out! I recreated Gaster's theme from the ground up for it, as well as made a Checker Dance recreation in a different key entirely to confuse people... You should also really check out his UNDERTALE & Deltarune videos, they're really good! Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time!