Vaporwave is a style built by slowing existing music right down and reworking it, often the glossy 80s and 90s sound of soft pop, smooth jazz, elevator music and old adverts, into something hazy, nostalgic and slightly dreamlike. Here is how the sound is made, and how to make it with material you are actually allowed to use.
Works in any DAW, with any sampler. Nothing here needs a particular plugin. The one rule that matters is starting from sources you have the right to use.
Vaporwave is a style built by taking existing music, usually the glossy commercial sound of the 1980s and 1990s, and slowing it down and reworking it into something hazy and nostalgic. Smooth jazz, soft pop, corporate muzak, elevator music and old television adverts are the usual raw material. The mood is the whole point: it sounds like a half remembered afternoon in a shopping mall, warm and a little sad at the same time.
It began as much as an aesthetic as a genre, tied to early internet imagery, old computer graphics, Roman statues and Japanese city pop. Musically though it comes down to a handful of moves done to a source recording. Most of the work is in choosing the source and the treatment rather than in writing new parts, which is what makes it approachable and also what makes the question of where the source comes from an important one.
The recurring ingredients are consistent from track to track:
Slow the tempo and drop the pitch, chop a short phrase and loop it, then drench it in reverb and wear it down with tape warble and light digital grit. No single effect does it on its own; the sound is the stack of them together, kept fairly heavy.
The signature move is slowing the source right down, often to somewhere around 70 to 85 percent of its original speed. Done the old tape way, the pitch falls with the speed, so everything drops a few semitones and turns heavy and syrupy. That single change does most of the work of turning a bright, up-tempo record into a slow, dreamy one.
Pick a short section, a bar or two, and loop it. A whole song played slow rarely holds up; a small phrase repeated is what gives vaporwave its fixed, hypnotic quality. Trim the loop so it joins cleanly end to end, and let it run.
A large, long reverb is most of the haze. It pushes the loop back and blurs the edges so it sounds distant and half remembered rather than up close. Hall and plate reverbs with a long tail suit it. Do not be shy here; this is one of the few places where more really is the sound.
Add tape wow and flutter for a gentle, seasick pitch drift, then a light bitcrush or a VHS-style degradation for worn digital and video texture. Roll the top end off so nothing sparkles. This wear is the same family of tools that ages a lo-fi beat, which we pull apart in how to make a lo-fi hip hop beat.
Most of the settings people ask about sit in a small range:
| Move | Typical | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Speed | 70 to 85% | Slows the source and drops its pitch a few semitones |
| Loop | 1 to 4 bars | A short phrase repeated, the backbone of the track |
| Reverb | Large, long tail | Pushes the loop back into a hazy, distant space |
| Wow and flutter | Gentle | A woozy, unsteady pitch drift over the top |
| Bitcrush / VHS | Light | Worn digital and video-tape texture |
| Top end | Rolled off | Takes the sparkle off for an older, duller feel |
Use your own recordings, or material that is properly licensed or royalty-free. Slowing a track down and adding reverb does not make it yours. Sampling someone else's recording without permission is copyright infringement, and putting it out can get it taken down or land you in a dispute you did not want.
This is worth being plain about, because plenty of vaporwave was built on uncleared samples and some of it has been pulled for exactly that reason. The good news is that the technique does not depend on using anyone else's record. You can get the same sound from material you are allowed to use:
Everything on this page works just as well on a phrase you played yourself. The slowing, the reverb and the tape wear do not care where the sound came from, so there is no need to build a track on someone else's record to get the vaporwave sound.
Pick a short passage you are allowed to use, slow it and pitch it down, loop it, add reverb and tape wear, and let a few loops drift against each other. Set it running, record a long pass, and keep the stretch that sounds best.
The arrangement is usually simple. One well-chosen loop, slowed and drenched, can carry a whole track on its own. The skill is in the choice of source and the depth of the treatment, not in piling on parts.
For more movement, layer two or three loops of slightly different lengths so they slide out of step and land in a new place on each pass, the trick at the heart of how to make an evolving tape loop. If you want a beat under it, keep it slow and soft so it sits below the haze rather than driving it.
Play your slowed loop next to the original source for a second, then mute the source and listen to the loop on its own for a minute. If it has stopped sounding like a track playing too slowly and started sounding like its own slow, hazy piece, the treatment is deep enough. If it still sounds like a slowed copy of something, add more reverb and more wear.
SILT is a generative tape-loop instrument. Drop your own sample in, or play a phrase, and it slows the loop down and wears it with wow, flutter, dust and dropout, which is the core vaporwave texture. Because you feed it your own material, the sound comes from something you are allowed to use.
It runs in the browser with no signup, and as a plugin in any DAW: Audio Unit, VST3, AAX and standalone. Everything above still works by hand, which is rather the point of writing it down. SILT is just the fast way to run it.
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