Whether you’re looking to dirty up select instrumentation or make the whole mix sound like it’s playing back from a knackered cassette tape, realise that authentic lo-fi styling with these half dozen production techniques.

1. Classic sounds

One of the easiest ways to suggest an aged, lo-fi aesthetic in any track is to work in some evocative vintage instruments, whether recorded for real, emulated with plugins or nabbed from sampled loop libraries. We’re talking, of course, about such hardy perennials as the Fender Rhodes electric piano, Hammond organ, Clavinet, and even early analogue synths – the Minimoog and Moog Modular, most pertinently. There are countless Kontakt libraries available covering all of these and more, as well as more detailed algorithmic emulations, like those in Arturia’s staggeringly comprehensive V-Collection.

Guitar can also be very effective at helping to deliberately age a track, and getting a vintage sound from your axe is a cinch using IK Multimedia AmpliTube, Positive Grid BIAS FX 2 or any other amp/cab/FX simulation, not to mention real-world classic guitar effects pedals, which can be found all over eBay. 

2. Gritty, grotty beats

The same principle applies in the drums department, too: the best starting points for lo-fi beats are crusty old sampled drum kits and ancient drum machines. If you’re lucky enough to have a real Chamberlin Rhythmate, Yamaha MR-10 or Korg Mini Pops at your disposal, you’re already winning on the latter front, but for everyone else, there’s Rhythmic Robot’s incredible catalogue of archaic beatbox Kontakt libraries, amongst other options.

The multisampled instrument landscape is littered with vintage drum kits, but as well as the drums themselves (you can’t go wrong with a ’50s, ’60s or ’70s Ludwig, Camco, Gretsch or Premier kit), pay attention to the gear used to record and mix them. If the multisamples were produced using vintage mics, consoles and outboard, pushing the sound all the way into lo-fi territory will be that bit easier than it would starting from a pristine modern production.

3. Distort and degrade

The judicious application of distortion – primarily analogue, but often also digital – is key to eliciting a lo-fi sound. For that all-important analogue crunch and solarised warmth, overdriven tubes, degraded tape, clipped amps and the like are all easily brought to bear using plugin effects. And if your lo-fi ambition extends into the early days of sampling, your DAW will include simple bitcrushing and sample rate reduction effects among its roster of onboard plugins, which may well be enough to tickle your retro-digital fancy. When greater control and historic legitimacy are called for, though, you’ll want to invest in something along the lines of Inphonik’s superb RX950 Classic AD/DA Converter (recreating the AD/DA conversion path of the Akai S950), or a full-on vintage sampler emulation like 112dB Morgana or Togu Audio Line TAL-Sampler.

We recently rounded up seven lo-fi-orientated plugins that every producer should check out.

4. Noise and ambience beds

As well as distortion, background noise is de rigueur in any lo-fi production, and the go-tos here are tape hiss and, to a lesser extent, vinyl crackle, both of which are well served by the software effects market – see the tape plugins round-up linked to above, and go and grab your free iZotope Vinyl download. However, there’s nothing stopping you getting a bit more creative with your lo-fi noise beds, substituting those literal electro-magnetic and mechanical simulations for other constant, frequency-rich source material.

Environmental field recordings can be great for this. Capture a few minutes of rainfall, running water, coffee shop ambience, motorway noise, etc, then mutate it with filters, modulation effects (see below), pitchshifting and timestretching, before sticking it on a track for the full length of the mix. Alternatively, try a regular noise generator (white, brown, pink, etc), or even a noisy, atonal, sustained synth sound. As long as this sort of thing is kept very low in the mix and relatively ‘unexposed’, it can give the impression of tape-style background noise, but with more colour, character and even musicality than you’ll get from a tape sim.

Finally, whatever your source of lo-fi background noise, you can really bring it to life by compressing it via an external sidechain input, so that it ducks whenever a selected signal (the drums, vocals or even the 2-bus) is present, then rises up to fill the gaps when it isn’t.

5. Turn off the grid

As intimated by the first two tips above, lo-fi isn’t only about degradation and noise – it can also involve instrument choice and performance style. Nothing will shatter the authenticity of your carefully processed retro-styled production faster than a rigidly quantised drum kit, bass or electric piano line, so always record your virtual instrument MIDI parts live if you can, and leave them unquantised – or apply a little iterative quantise should they be just too wayward to leave as is. If your chops are lacking, temporarily slow the tempo right down and/or break the part into short sections if necessary; and when programming it in the piano roll is the only option, fake a live feel by drawing the MIDI notes slightly off the quantise grid.

This can even apply to lo-fi projects of the entirely electronic kind, too, as early, pre-MIDI drum machines and sequencers were known to drift somewhat timing-wise.

6. Modulation effects

Being essentially rooted in the legacy of analogue tape, the lo-fi sound draws heavily on modulation – specifically, desynchronised fluctuations and ‘wobble’, mainly of pitch, but also amplitude. So, crank up the wow and flutter controls on your tape sim, or the warp parameter of your record deck emulation plugin, and bask in those glorious knackered-capstan or buckled-vinyl vibes.

Moving beyond that and into actual modulation effects, though, the timeless likes of tremolo, vibrato, flanging, phasing, chorusing and rotary speaker sims can all be called on to impart old-school flavour. Just be sure to keep those LFOs unsynced, as, again, metronomic timing can be counterproductive when aiming for a vintage and/or lo-fi result.

We recently rounded up some of our favourite modulation effects, any of which would make fine additions to your lo-fi toolbox.

Do you have any valuable lo-fi-ification wisdom to share? Let us know in the comments.