Welcome to my Lo-Fi Hip Hop Beat story…..
Link to post here. NI Blog here.
How it started…..
So I read through our lo-fi hip hop beat a little bit, and the article recommends opening up Battery in Komplete Kontrol. I don’t have Battery currently, so this was the first challenge to overcome. For me, I went exploring in the Ableton Packs that I have and found this jazzy kit, Drum Booth, that I started with to get moving in the song. After I finished building the drums, I realized that I was going to be missing an important element from the sample in the article…
Notice how the loop has a bit of vinyl crackle to it? It’s subtle textures like these that help create that lo-fi aesthetic we’re going for.
Plug-ins here we come. I am adding the Vinyl plugin from Komplete Start to try and emulate that Lo-Fi sound. Next we load Kontakt, and look for the Homage pack. I grabbed the Vintage Organs plugin for my starting sounds, which I got as part of the Komplete 14 Select. I read jazz chords, and Ab/Db, so I just did a quick 2-5-1-6 in Db. As I was futzing around, I ended up with my minor in 4th voicings like Maiden Voyage, and then wrote them out from there. I started adding some other instruments, but then went back to the article to pick up where I left off.
<< chart >>
The article next tells me to add a bassline, then some samples, and then on to arranging.
Being a bass player, and that generally being a more prominent instrument in my tunes, I decided to move towards arranging. I scrolled down to the final track, and played it a few times. Near as I can tell this is roughly the song layout or arrangement below. The loop with the chords is 2 bars, and they have 2 loops for each of the below phrases.
Intro - Intro & Drums - Melody Statement #1 - Melody Statement #2 - Solo (2 phrases) - Outro
Using this as a template to start I decided to arrange my work in progress with this, but a bit of a small group reading a chart type arrangement.
Intro - Intro & Drums - Melody Statement #1 - Melody Statement #2 - Solo (2 phrases) - Melody Statement #3 - Outro
So now, I have an idea of how long this will be, so I can start working on the individual noises, bleeps, & loops. Start working up a bass part, and see what other instruments will work with this project.
How it went…..
So a couple of super fun things came out of this. One was how to make a boring organ part into something much funkier. I ran my boring long sustained organ chords, through a gate that was side chained with the Hi Hats. I chose those, as I spent a good amount of time, trying to get a swing to those, and I thought to add that rhythm quickly to another instrument. I created a new audio track and recorded the results, which allowed me to fade back and for the between the 2 tracks during the song. Neat!
Total props to JWords for the idea/ genesis of this idea! Here is the video showing how it was done.
The other was the Irish Harp from Native Instruments. I took the same boring long chords from the organ line, and copied the midi part to the Harp. Drop and arpeggiator on the track with some echo and reverb. I just want to say how much I love Raum. And way, switch the mdi a bit, so there is a bit more movement, and then bounce those down to 2 new tracks. One with the Echo, and one with it turned off. Then you can go in, and chop those up, and time shift the new ones back a bit, and now we have a home made effect that you can use, or not, or chop, or drop as you so see fit. Check the screen shots as we go.
The Final Thing ///////
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