Lo-fi production techniques/sound experimentation

Just curious if any of you guys like to manipulate sound with random outside gear. May it be some top notch expensive stuff all the way down to a cheap casio keyboard...

I personally like playing around with cassette recorders (handhelds, multitracks, decks, etc).

I also like running audio through my stereo, then have the audio cable plugged halfway in on the output when recording back into my daw. Not sure what it does, but it seems to take out a lot of the foreground frequencies and makes things sound cool.

There's this old casio keyboard that I have (PTK 496 I think, I'm not looking at it) and it has a mic/line input. It seems to darken any sounds I run through it, and it sounds really cool when you drive it. I imagine all it's doing is lowering the sample/bit rate. That's what it looks like anyway when I run it back into my daw in comparison with the original audio.


But yeah, it'd be nice to see what some of you guys do to color your sounds.

I like putting sounds through VHS, having that tracking/wobble sound.

very nice lo-fi effect

bearhead wrote:Just curious if any of you guys like to manipulate sound with random outside gear. May it be some top notch expensive stuff all the way down to a cheap casio keyboard...

Since I work with outside samplers = yes my samples are manipulated by outside gear Sometimes I also use an old GTR FX (Digitech GSP5). Really nice on drums (I mostly use it to slightly distort the samples and give them some roomreverb)

bearhead wrote:I also like running audio through my stereo, then have the audio cable plugged halfway in on the output when recording back into my daw. Not sure what it does, but it seems to take out a lot of the foreground frequencies and makes things sound cool.

I bet this is the karaoke FX or rather said: phase cancellation.

peace

forknspoon wrote:I like putting sounds through VHS, having that tracking/wobble sound.

very nice lo-fi effect

I've only used VHS on a few of my mixes. I love the distortion on the high end. It's very different from tape to my ears. Also the popping is quite nice. I need to do it more, but it's such a process trying to find the sounds. Having a screen helps though.

peterpiper wrote:

bearhead wrote:Just curious if any of you guys like to manipulate sound with random outside gear. May it be some top notch expensive stuff all the way down to a cheap casio keyboard...

Since I work with outside samplers = yes my samples are manipulated by outside gear Sometimes I also use an old GTR FX (Digitech GSP5). Really nice on drums (I mostly use it to slightly distort the samples and give them some roomreverb)

bearhead wrote:I also like running audio through my stereo, then have the audio cable plugged halfway in on the output when recording back into my daw. Not sure what it does, but it seems to take out a lot of the foreground frequencies and makes things sound cool.

I bet this is the karaoke FX or rather said: phase cancellation.

peace

I eventually want to get some old guitar effect pedals and run some sounds through them. That's a pretty easy way to color sounds. I always use Logic's pedal effects in place of them.

Right now Im using a rack mount ASR10.

Just started rockin the Tascam 4 track. I had it for a long time but never thought I'd be putting beats on it. Real glad I started **** with it though. It makes everything sound so ill. Just don't quite have it mastered yet. I definitely got some shit in the works though. I gotta get that 90 minute maxell steez goin

I just record straight from the sampler. No compressors or EQ between the MPC and the CD recorder. That raw sound. To me thats lo-fi. A cheap and minimal set-up.

I still need to find a nice vhs player that has some sort of audio gain on it.

What I used is a sampler with a 32kHz samplerate, and its detune starts to get real nice when you take it down about two octaves.

also a reel2reel tape machine. if it doesnt flutter enough you can just hands on flutter that shit, make it as shitty as you want it to be.

YES.

Usually bounce back and forth between 303, 404 and now ST-224. Pitching things up and down, **** the sound up with plenty of effects and resampling at lower bitrates before hitting the MPC.

Could be from wax, cd, wav or mp3 even... it would get a texture of its own.

PEACE

Recording parts to tape (any tape, from cassette to reel to reel), then recording/sampling them back in. I always wanted to press up some dub plates with parts on them then sample those - something I've never got around to.

Or, being completely cheaty iZotope's free Vinyl plugin is quite cool and relatively authentic-sounding.

Ill-Green wrote:I just record straight from the sampler. No compressors or EQ between the MPC and the CD recorder. That raw sound. To me thats lo-fi. A cheap and minimal set-up.

I usually use my old Numark DM1650 DJ mixer for EQing, especially when I record Electribe ES-1.
But I often get the better result with just tracking MPC straight to audio interface.

It is alway better to use effects an EQ gingerly and sparsely. No amount of effects or EQs will transform wack beats to dope beats.

At my spot we have this huge unfinished basement so we've done different things to use it as a reverb. The basement is one level down and I'm 2 levels up so there's 3 stories between me and the basement.

On occasion we'll actually record drums down there because the verb is nice. We've done some tricks with it as well. Putting a stereo pair of mic's down there and sending a mix via aux to stereo speakers in order to make the room a reverb chamber. We've also put a bass amp in the basement and faced it up the stairs and mic'd the cab at the source and at every flight of the stairwell (3 total). If you time align the signal a bit to reduce phase issues the tone becomes incredibly fat (albeit the mic on the 3rd story is basically noise.)

I've done a few reverb chambers where the aux send was sent through a downsampling effect. That can get you a very nice chip tune sounding verb while allowing you to leave your mix clean. Very ethereal.

reasample by using a different mics and different speakers...
9of course making sure your not monitoring the input (mic) stick the mic infront of the speaker and resample the drums. Works good on really clean drum sounds...

groovemonger wrote:Recording parts to tape (any tape, from cassette to reel to reel), then recording/sampling them back in.

JVC wrote:I usually use my old Numark DM1650 DJ mixer for EQing...

dazastah wrote:reasample by using a different mics and different speakers...

I've done all of these things before. I haven't done any tape resampling in a while. I should probably get back into doing that. I just find it easier to do full stem recording instead. Sort of treating the tape as a bus per set of channel strips, etc.

I have a cheap, dusty Radio Shack DJ mixer that I've used a handful of times to run sounds through, and dirty them up a bit. After a few passes through, the tone is much darker, and makes tracks sound a bit muddier (but in a good way).

With the whole resampling through a speaker/mic setup, I've actually recorded full mixdowns doing this before. I mic'd both speakers so that the mix would be stereo, and had the songs record down onto my 4 track. I haven't done this in a while either, but it made things sound a bit more worn out in a way. Kind of a cool effect.

sp 303 lo-fi sampling mode and vinyl sim compressor