That’s easily achieved with a few quick steps.įirst, we’re going to use EQ to mimic the limited bandwidth of vintage radios by cutting off the lowest and highest frequencies. In lofi, we’re going for smudged, dusty and warm sounds that mimic faulty vintage equipment.
As we mentioned earlier, lofi is short for “low fidelity”-a way of describing how clean or “true” something sounds. Not enough change makes it boring, but too much change loses the chill.Ī common feature to all Lofi beats is right in the name. We don’t want things to go crazy, we’re just adding a barely-perceptible difference occasionally. The trick to this is that a little bit goes a long way. You can also make small, occasional changes to the other instruments using the same principle. They’ll also drop out occasionally, or have a quick fill. One or two notes might be a little late, or a little early. This involves sliding the drum notes just a little bit off the grid. Well there’s a big difference between simple and boring! We don’t want boring-and a great way to do that is to add little variations and imperfections to the beat. Remember in the first tip we said to keep the beat simple.
Some ways we can add imperfections start with the drums. This helps balance out the chill feeling with just enough flavor to feel unique and cool to listen to. When we’re making Lofi beats, we want to find sneaky ways to keep the music interesting, and just a little bit different.
