Lo fi sound effects
Now let’s introduce some fairly subtle low pass filtering on each of the elements: Here’s a quick beat I cooked up without filtering:
The suggestion of frequencies and sounds that we can’t quite hear is crucial here, hence the importance of rolling back those highs with some filtering! Brightness and treble in general can be aggressive and tiring forces on the ear, and our goal here is to produce a hazy, mellow sound, so we need to dial those highs back to get there. This will allow more of the highs to poke through than with a steeper slope, say 24dB, though in a quieter state. If your drums are too bright, you’ve lost the LoFi battle I would suggest opting for gentler sloped filtering for our purposes here, such as 12dB or even 6dB. Throw it on everything - synths, vocals, guitars, bass and especially, drums. Some might even offer drive or saturation controls more on this below! Any DAW worth its salt will have a native LP filter for you to use, ready to go as soon as you boot up your software. Whilst the humble EQ and compressor are almost undoubtedly the most important tools known to man, or at least us music producers, the filter comes in a close runner-up.įor those of us looking to turn back the clock on our sound, filtering becomes more important still specifically of the low pass variety. Whilst my aim here is far from presenting a comprehensive list of devices that will help grunge up your mix, I’d like to explore only the most crucial and essential toys of the trade and thus provide you with a solid platform from which to begin your gritty sonic experiments. Let’s take a look at my 5 top tools for taking things back to the days of low fidelity, shall we? Leaving the bug-that-must-not-be-named to one side for now, today I’d like to focus our collective production lens on tools and tricks that will help make your music to sound like it came from another era, a time of transistors, tubes and frayed wires!įrom Synthwave to LoFi Hip Hop, that hazy, retro sound is an irresistible force in today’s popular music and one that we certainly don’t mind indulging in more than a little here at ModeAudio. Nostalgia was big in 2019 but thanks to a certain pandemic that has swept the globe over the past 12 months, it had an even bigger year in 2020.