Producer Workshop: How to create authentic LoFi hip-hop

1 Kickstart

The biggest secret behind LoFi's success recipe, apart from the playful, anti-hectic melodies and beats, is of course the retro feel with low-fidelity elements such as the typical crackling of vinyl, 12-bit drums or low sample rates for the sounds used. No problem for you and us, we even use a LoFi reverb to make things authentic.

Listen to the result right here in the video:

2 Piano lead

We start with a piano melody at 75 BPM, you can't go wrong with that. We use a simple piano from Reason's ID8-Rompler, but any other piano will do. And if – like us – you're not a keyboard virtuoso, you can help yourself to the LOFI PIANO MIDI FILES folder by Michael Kim-Sheng.

3 Muffled sound

For a dull sound, we load a FabFilter Pro-Q 3 behind the piano and apply an 18 dB high cut at 1 kHz with a slope of 0.7 (Q). Behind this we load the new FabFilter Pro-R 2 Reverb and come to the real trick: instead of the existing presets, we use the new import function for impulse responses and load a reverb from the classic Akai S1100.

4 Import impulse response

If you're going LoFi, then do it properly, right? At AudioBombs you will find 20 such responses from the Akai S1100 sampler, from which we import Small Room 1. For more sonic thickness, we turn PREDELAY almost all the way up, CHARACTER and DUCKING to 9 o'clock and WIDTH and THICKNESS to full throttle. The latter is also new and enriches the reverb with saturation.

5 Add vinyl crackle

If necessary, load an instance of iZotope Vinyl onto the track, but reduce the Dust to zero, because we have a different plan. We load the same effect onto an empty audio track, turn Dust up to full and record the crackling over eight bars. We then use time stretch to double the length of the recording.

6 Akai again

We load another FabFilter Pro-R 2 Reverb onto the track with the recording and import the Impulse Response S1100 Shaft. Here we turn up CHARACTER and DUCKING so that the reverb doesn't sound so static on the one hand and the crackling still comes through on the other. We subtly mix in the result to create an enormous amount of width in the overall mix.

And that's it! Listen to the result in the video above.

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