Lofi, dirty sound the hard way

[sleepymoose]

Hi there!

I'm trying to find a way to get that sound, without simply getting a plugin to do it for me. I'm trying to use Live 8's effects only because I think that will greatly help my mastering skills if I ever get to it

Sooo, best things I could come up with were:

- Feed the snare and other percussions to a reverb, whose output goes into an EQ8: The idea being that I need to distort/saturate the trailing sound left by a snare/tamb/shaker, etc. but not so much the percussion itself.

Not so bad, but I don't like the "echo" (decay) and I can't get rid of it. How do I get rid of the echo, but still have that trailing sound I need ?

I tried Grain Delay too (Grains) then feed that to an EQ8/Distort/Saturate but Grains sound too hi-fi and not enough randomness...

I tried Note Lengh on the Drum Rack, no go.

I tried Pitch on the Drum Rack, no go either.

Any other ideas ?

[flippo]

gate on the verb?

[BassTooth]

first off, what is lo-fi? you-tube example please...

if you wanna make stuff sound dirty, there are a ton of ways to get there...
for starters:
Saturator
Dynamic Tube
Overdrive
Redux
Erosion
Vinyl Dist.
Compressor
Limiter
Reverb

use low quality samples, use old crackly distorted samples from vinyl, etc.

use Limiter! i love limiter. crank the Limiter gain and squish the hell out of your sound, throw a reverb on it then compress it again!

for drums try Impulse instead of drum Racks. Impulse has random modders for Transpose and Pan and Filter. try Simpler instead of Sampler...

there tons more. AUTOMATE!! you can automate most parameters in random ways to make your sound dirty...

[yur2die4]

Along with all the options the above poster mentioned, you can also use Autopan. Crank up the S&H

[LT3]

ok so i know this may be a stupid question but what does 'parameters' mean? im fairly new to writing music on the computer but ive been a dj for nearly 10 years!

[BassTooth]

parameters = functions, buttons you can push, things you can modulate or automate. like the frequency and resonance settings on a filter.

[LT3]

ahhh! (sound of penny dropping!!) thanks bass tooth!!!

[sleepymoose]

Thanks people, this is really helpful.

[MacGuffin]

A cool unexpensive thing to try (even if it's not vsts) is recording your stuff with a dirty tape deck on some old cassette tape. It doesn't sound good on a whole mix, but pads or fx can be really dirtied up with this.

[mono point]

[unix23]

Yup.

Also,

Amp
Badly abused compressors
Sampler using pitch modulation and AM or FM. Set the control signal to an audio-rate type frequency
Delays with very short times for robot effects
Flange with a high mod rate
Anything with a high modulation rate, really
Pitching samples down
Impulse Responses for the Max IR player
Look in your Max folder, in general

first off, what is lo-fi? you-tube example please...

if you wanna make stuff sound dirty, there are a ton of ways to get there...
for starters:
Saturator
Dynamic Tube
Overdrive
Redux
Erosion
Vinyl Dist.
Compressor
Limiter
Reverb

use low quality samples, use old crackly distorted samples from vinyl, etc.

use Limiter! i love limiter. crank the Limiter gain and squish the hell out of your sound, throw a reverb on it then compress it again!

for drums try Impulse instead of drum Racks. Impulse has random modders for Transpose and Pan and Filter. try Simpler instead of Sampler...

there tons more. AUTOMATE!! you can automate most parameters in random ways to make your sound dirty...

[mortalengines]

Look around a little and try some free vst plugs for spring and plate reverbs...I don't know why but, I find that squashing signals with Live's Compressor, sending various instruments to a return track with some plate reverb, and then using a limiter over the entire mix goes a long way toward a "lo-fi" (kind of 70s FM radio) sort of sound. I do this with varying degrees
over just about any tracks I work on as I really sort of hate what passes itself off as "high fidelity". I grew up in the age of vinyl and 8 track tapes, and that's a sound I kind of pursue these days. I'll use a little dynamic tube or erosion as well on some tracks but, usually it's just barely noticeable if I do.