Vaporwave generator

What vaporwave is

Vaporwave is a genre and visual style that grew up on the internet in the early 2010s. Its producers took music that once sounded expensive and optimistic, such as 80s pop, smooth jazz, lounge music and the background tracks of adverts and shopping malls, and played it back slower, lower and blurrier. The result sounds like a memory of a place rather than the place itself: familiar, a bit uncanny, and slightly sad.

Macintosh Plus’s Floral Shoppe (2011) is the album most often pointed to as a landmark. Its best-known track slows an 80s pop song until the vocal becomes a deep, smeared drawl, then loops and echoes it. That approach, heavy slowdown plus a dreamy, degraded texture, is what most people mean when they ask for a “vaporwave remix” today.

The genre has since split into many offshoots, and fans argue about the boundaries. You don’t need to settle any of that to make a track that sounds the part. The recipe below covers the core sound, and every ingredient is a slider you can push further.

The vaporwave recipe

The Vaporwave preset is loaded when you open this page. It is a starting point, not a rule. Here is what it sets and the range that usually works for each control.

Speed: how far to slow it

With the pitch following the speed, every step down also lowers the key. At 0.8× the song drops about 3.9 semitones, at 0.75× about 5, at 0.72× about 5.7, and at 0.65× about 7.5. A three-minute song becomes roughly 4:10 at 0.72× and 4:37 at 0.65×. The tempo readout under the player shows the new BPM, which is handy if you want an upbeat 118 BPM pop song to land near a lazy 85 BPM.

Upbeat tracks can take more slowing than ballads, because they start with more energy to lose. If a slow song already drags at 0.75×, try 0.8× and let the reverb and wobble do the rest. For more on speed choices, see the slow down song tool.

Reverb: big, dark and far away

Vaporwave reverb is usually larger and darker than a typical slowed edit. A hall at 50% with a 4–5 second decay is a safe start. Raise damping so the tail is soft rather than splashy, and set the reverb low cut to 150–250 Hz if the bass starts to boom inside the reverb. If you mostly want to shape the space, the add reverb to audio page goes into each reverb control in more detail.

Texture: wobble, vinyl and warmth

These three controls, found under Lo-fi, give vaporwave its worn-out feel. Tape wobble makes the pitch drift gently, as if the cassette had been left in a hot car; past about 45% it starts to sound seasick. Vinyl crackle adds surface noise, which is most noticeable in quiet intros and outros. Warmth adds soft saturation that thickens the sound. Bitcrush is also there, but use it sparingly here; it suits lo-fi edits more than classic vaporwave.

Variations to try

Mallsoft

Mallsoft is usually described as vaporwave that sounds like it is playing in an empty shopping centre: distant, echoing and in the background. To get close, switch the reverb space to Arena or Cathedral, raise the amount to 60–70% and the decay to 6–9 seconds, add 50–80 ms of pre-delay, and pull the muffle down to 3–5 kHz. Narrowing the stereo width to 60–80% can help the music feel like it is coming from ceiling speakers rather than headphones.

Late-night drive

Keep the speed around 0.8×, use a plate reverb at 40% with a 3.5 second decay, add a soft echo (about 15% at 400–500 ms), and keep wobble low at 10–15%. This works well for synth-pop and city pop where you still want the groove to come through.

Deep and slurred

Drop to 0.65–0.68×, raise bass to +3 or +4 dB, add warmth up to 35%, and keep the reverb at 40% so the low, slow vocal stays readable. If the low end turns muddy, set a low cut of 40–60 Hz under Bass & tone.

Choosing a track

The genre’s source material was chosen for a reason. Polished studio recordings with clean vocals, bright synths, saxophone or electric piano hold up best when slowed this much. Dense rock or heavily distorted tracks often collapse into noise. Start from the best-quality file you have, ideally lossless or a 320 kbps MP3, because the high cut and reverb will make compression artefacts easier to hear, not harder.

If you trim the song with the waveform handles to loop a short section, turn on Loop and listen several times before exporting. Short loops of a single chorus are a classic vaporwave move.

Exporting your remix

For listening, a 320 kbps MP3 is plenty. If you plan to edit further in a DAW, export WAV or FLAC so you don’t stack lossy compression. For a visual, pick Video: a 1080p MP4 in 16:9 suits YouTube uploads, and 9:16 suits Shorts, Reels and TikTok. Leave “let the reverb ring out” on so the tail fades naturally.

A note on rights: vaporwave has always sat in a grey area, but platforms enforce copyright on slowed edits like any other upload. Remix music you own or have permission to use, and read our guide to posting edits for the practical side.