An ocean of dotted lights illuminate the warehouse. Just remember, you want your tone to be listenable so make incremental changes at a time.Stage lights off, phone lights on for Another One. Try applying band-pass filters to remove some of the low and high-end frequencies. If you’re still not happy with the outcome, it’s time to dive into post-EQ plugins within your DAW. Condenser and ribbon mics are more adept than their dynamic counterparts at detecting the tonal cracks and imperfections you’ve worked to create. Try positioning your mic central to the speaker cone, wider on the rim, or even further away from the amp than usual. Lofi should come across effortlessly, with spiky peaks and wet-mixed modulation effects. Go against your natural instincts to make your tone sound “good”. This is a great way to recreate the vinyl effect without buying a dedicated pedal and gives you way more sculpting flexibility.
The fluctuations of vibrato and the repeats of a delay take on a much grittier edge if you feed them into a mid-gain overdrive or fuzz. Most guides tell you to place them in the signal chain last, however we’re not after perfection in that sense. Try placing your delay and vibrato before a drive pedal. Those time-based delay and reverb pedals should get a little dirty with an overdrive as they hit the front of the amp. The effects loop isolates your pedals from the preamp and keeps everything way too clean for what we’re trying to achieve. Featured Amps, speakers and valvesįirst off, ditch the effects loop in your amp. Celestion Greenbacks sound great with their midrange bump and slightly restrained highs. From there, it’s really up to you what speaker you choose.
So let’s keep them small for lofi, no bigger than 10 inches in diameter. In the speaker department, large speakers generally means a larger sound. This gives you some nice tonal variety if you balance the gain to spike with heavier picking. The low clean headroom makes it easier to your saturate your guitar signal at lower volumes.
#Another one mac demarco bpm series#
Alternatives include the Orange Rocker series and Supro Delta King.ĮL84 valves are the common choice for a lofi amp. You can get a very thin, boxy tone out of the classic AC15 because of its combination of preamp, power amp and smaller speakers in combo models. Some amps and amp brands naturally suit lofi, with Vox being the major player. Stick with real tubes where you can, as solid state amps tend to sound quite sterile – not really the vibe we’re after here. Don’t be afraid to experiment lofi is all about finding new ways to create atmosphere through the gear you have at your disposal.Ī valve amp is a must-have for the most authentic of lofi tones. Most of the ideas below work well with both guitar and synth. It’s equally adept at carrying a song or providing dynamic nuance. It can also have a bit of a higher gain kick to it, used by Boards of Canada and Covet to varying degrees. Other times it’s soft and rounded like Tycho or Hoogway. Sometimes it’s thin, warbly and abrasive like Mac DeMarco. Lofi often incorporates forms of vibrato, tremolo, delay and light overdrive or fuzz. Truthfully, there are countless takes on the effect. How would you describe lofi? When applied to a guitar, the aim is to usually recreate the unique sound of a warped vinyl record. In practice, there’s a much wider scope for lofi to bring out new textures or themes in a song.
Let’s get the most obvious “meme-able” source of lofi out the way: listen to lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to (a quick Youtube search will do the trick) for the most on-the-nose example of what it’s all about. You can apply lofi to all different kinds of instruments, and it works especially well with synths and guitars to give your sound a kind of old school, DIY production vibe. Lofi (short for low-fidelity and sometimes spelled “lo-fi” or “lo fi”) is a popular sound most often used in indie rock, hip hop and alternative pop – but features in loads of songs across a vast spectrum of music.