A bit far afield from most trance, techno, and house production, but who else is interested in making some of your sounds a bit gritty, noisy, and "lo-fi?" And if you are, what are some of your favorite techniques for degrading your sound or recordings to give them that lo-fi feel?

Obviously there are the tried and tested things like tape saturation VSTs, pitch randomization, and bit-crushing, but what are some of your other methods? Most of us are spending most of our time in the digital domain, so we have to work a little for that grit. ;-)

One thing I like to do sometimes is put a few things (some percussion, or even a random recording of some kind) in a loop at a really low volume, sometimes with a lot of reverb so they sound really "distant." The volume is low enough so that you could miss it if you aren't paying close attention, but high enough that it adds a bit of noise and character to the loop.

Band-pass filtering and even comb-filtering come to mind.

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I once put a drum loop as a trigger to a gate that let through some white noise. Fast attack and release let the noise through only on the beats and subtle enough it just added some dirt to the otherwise clean sound.

What became really interesting was sening the gated white noise to a reverb send that was ducked by the same drums!

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This falls outside of the digital domain, but I once experimented with re-micing a signal that was coming out of my monitors and I even tried it with my headphones. The results were variable and I was mostly just screwing around (i.e., not using it for a particular track), but I could certainly see it working pretty well with the right combination of mic (preferably a cheap dynamic mic for a lo-fi effect) and signal.

quote:

Originally posted by tehlord I once put a drum loop as a trigger to a gate that let through some white noise. Fast attack and release let the noise through only on the beats and subtle enough it just added some dirt to the otherwise clean sound. What became really interesting was sening the gated white noise to a reverb send that was ducked by the same drums!

Ooh - I might have to steal that idea!

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quote:

Ooh - I might have to steal that idea!

No problem.

That will be seven of your American dollars

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glitch and modulation will help get that lofi feal also zebra has a good way if sounding shit but in a good way

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owien-us

sample everything at 11025hz

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i writed a song.

resampling helps a bit.

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I used to use a plugin called Sonic Destructor, although not as much lately.

In one of my old tracks I got a pretty nice lo-fi sound by bouncing that part of the track, downconverting to 8/22, upconverting back to 32/44 for processing, throwing on a bandpass filter (maybe two, I forget), adding some artificial vinyl clicks and other artifacts, creating a stutter at the end (slow, not a "glitch" type stutter, it was meant to mimic a record skipping), and mixing it into a distorted copy of itself. That was the most adventurous I ever got.

Of course the best way to get a lo-fi sound is to put it through a chain that's actually lo-fi. Tapes, cheap mics, old stereos, AM or FM radio transmitters, whatever. I've also got a hobbyist-quality tube amp that's fun to use for that sort of thing. I know it's all out of the box, but it's not like it's expensive.

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