Today we’d like to introduce you to Sam Miller.
Hi Sam, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I was inspired by the Donkey Kong Country games to learn music as a teenager. I feel that video games in the 90s captured a sense of feel-good melodicism and ingenuity with its music that has since been lost.
I dissected and analyzed these tunes to discover how they were engineered and what it was I loved about them so much. I went to university in New Orleans for film because I was already studying music on my own accord, so I thought I’d learn a bit about the visual side of things. I also loved going to Frenchman Street and hearing New Orleans jazz, which was very inspiring for music. I worked whatever jobs were easiest so that I could go home, learn more about music, then go hear the bands play on Frenchman Street.
Around 2016, I discovered that I could dissect the music from these soundtracks, and I also discovered that the composers sampled the instruments that play the music from things like keyboards, drum machines, and sample CDs.
Composer David Wise had mentioned in interviews that the Korg Wavestation was used to score Donkey Kong Country, so I bought a digital version of it from Korg’s website and found many of the sounds I knew and loved from the game right there in the Wavestation. I dug deeper to find more originating from the Roland R8 drum machine.
In those days video games had very low quality music due to the tech they were working with, but in these machines I heard the instruments in much clearer quality than I’d ever heard them before. It was like my childhood come to life. I eventually realized that I could recreate the entire composition, note for note, with these original samples, which resulted in the same song, but in crisp clear quality. I called this process “restoration” in reference to the practice of “restoring” old paintings, or “restoring” old movies to blu-ray.
I performed this process on the legendary Aquatic Ambience song from Donkey Kong Country, and put it to YouTube in 2017, where it got considerable attention. I hadn’t really considered the potential still, because when I tried to monetize my YouTube, it kept saying it sent something to my address for verification, but I would never receive it no matter how much I tried. I graduated university but did not have much luck in film and continued to work easy jobs while focusing on music.
I continued to restore Donkey Kong Country soundtracks and even a few others. A record label proposed to work with me licensing and selling a vinyl record of my restored soundtracks, and another label even paid me hourly to restore a soundtrack of their choosing with the express purpose that it be licensed and sold to vinyl. In 2021, I moved to NYC where I worked as catering staff for events, where I continued to go and see live jazz music every chance I got. NYC had its own unique flavor.
In about 2023, my roommate, who is an avid YouTuber suggested I contact support to find out why they are not sending me verification. I got it resolved and was able to monetize my channel. Slowly I began to phase out manual labor and subsist on my YouTube alone. I continued to restore whatever I saw fit, and a good bit of income continued to flow into my account, like a passive income. It didn’t matter much what I did, because it was all music, people would keep coming back to the videos to listen to the music and I’d get paid off ad revenue.
At that point, it didn’t make much sense for me to live in the most expensive city in the world, so in 2025, I moved out and did a 3 month backpacking trip through Latin America with everything I owned, and continued to restore game soundtracks while staying in hostels with a slimmed down setup.
Afterwards, I moved to Barcelona, a city with its own unique flavor of live music, and since then I’ve felt compelled to write my own original music styled after retro video games, and also create my own covers of some of the songs I knew and loved, while still continuing to restore game music. I found that there was a large community of people like me who grew up with these games and still remembered them fondly. Through my YouTube and Discord server, I was able to foster a space for these people to get together and bond over shared nostalgia.
Later that year, I met the love of my life in Barcelona who unfortunately didn’t have the privilege of living wherever she wants like I do, but I’m hoping she can get a sponsorship somewhere so we can be together. I’ve grown more and more fond of classical music, and become interested in writing more of my own pieces.
Due to an inability to withstand the Spanish summer heat, I’ve recently embarked in a second backpacking journey, this time through the United Kingdom, where I will continue to study composition and create more music as I travel the world.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
I would say it’s been pretty smooth as far as music and money goes. I’ve been extremely lucky. It was a bit rocky after Uni when I was trying to make ends meet, and I was having trouble making friends. It was quite a lonely time, but I’m very fortunate that no matter what happened, I’ve always had time to create and study my craft with very little blockages along the way. Enough money to survive has always seemed to flow in my direction, and I’ve somehow gotten opportunities to go to incredible places, meet incredible people, and hear incredible music
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I created restorations of classic video game soundtracks from the 90s and 2000s, which suffered from poor quality audio. I figured out a unique way to dissect these soundtracks and reconstruct them from the ground up in crisp high quality, via a technical process called restoration. I also create covers of retro game soundtracks, and write originals in that style.
I specialize in nostalgia. People that grew up with these soundtracks remembered these games so fondly, and hearing them in high quality really brings them back to their childhood in a unique way.
I believe that these soundtracks of old really captured something that was lost in video games and in music in general: they used memorable melodies, and feel good harmony to craft sonic textures which combined elements of classical, jazz, and world music into something truly magical. I try to capture that in my restorations, covers, and original music.
I’m most proud of my ability to craft a sound which can make people feel at peace, make them want to sing or dance, and conjure an image of another world, all without uttering a single lyric. Music is a language all its own
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
Taking risks is a necessity. If I don’t take risks I’ll never find anything new. It’s important that I’m always connected to the present as much as possible, never retreating to the past or worrying about the distant future. Only then can I be paying enough attention to the world around me to calculate the best risk to take.
Pricing:
- Think about what you reasonably can live on
- Think about what people can reasonably afford to pay you
- Through trial and error, find what people are willing to pay
- I find that people who truly care about you as an artist will be willing to pay you what you’re worth
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