#61

PrimalTap from Soundtoys has a very unusual feature. There is a Multiply control which doubles the delay time and halves the sample rate with each turn of the rotary switch. So as loops get longer, they get more lo-fi and are pitched down/up octaves.

I haven’t found anything else that sounds like it and everything I run through it ends up sounding lovely.

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#62

I am very intrigued by the @airwindows plugins mentioned in this thread and would love to try them (and add my support for them on patreon of course) but it looks like MacOS Catalina does not want to let these run in Logic, has anyone had any luck with these on Catalina? I wasn’t sure where to ask this question but I’d appreciate any help, thank you!

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#63

For lo-fi: an old Casio SK-1 keyboard, line-out from earphone jack; old Yamaha DD-14 drum pad thing, again using audio line-out instead of midi connections; field recordings - I used to carry around a tape deck, but now use the record function buried in soundcloud and record with my average phone; old records; anything through guitar pedals; web pages that do voice synthesis and save out to bitty mp3s… that sort of thing. I have a few tape loops in cassette cases but have not used in years, bc got lazy and looped in computer.

Just getting off the BPM grid of your DAW is a start. I don’t have any mod-synth units.

I made this box recently - thrifted case, old guitar strings, contact mic taped on the inside –

IMG_20200405_001505877
IMG_20200405_0015058771080×1440 151 KB

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#64

Cassettes are great for that. You can get a cheap cassette dictaphone, record on that and then play it back to the computer. It will always loose something. They sometimes have crude limiters built-in that you can experiment with. Also - shaking the device gently while it’s recording or playing stuff back will give you some nice wobble.

Another thing to try is running the audio through cassette multiple times. It will degrade with every pass and since you need to record each of them anyway, you’ll have a wide palette of lo-fi to choose from.

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#65

I don’t use the modular much these days but PT delays and the original Tyme Sefari I really love. I never even really used it all that much as a delay or to do anything crazy but I’ll keep it forever just found myself constantly running things through it to give it the sound I wanted. Same thing for PT delays - pushing them to the noisy point and using it not so much as a delay but colouring effect.

I really like using a lot of crappy digital noise/aliasing/bit reduction type stuff. I still have a bunch of patchblocks and find I use them a lot still over an Axoloti or PD, both as effects or sound sources since they are 10bit/20k and get plenty noise/dirty. I also have a bunch of cheap $2 mini mp3 players that the D/A converter is terrible on and glitches out quite a bit that I love the sound of. The other nice thing about PT delays is you don’t even need a modular, theres plenty of cheap pedals or pre-built cheap “karaoke effects” units available for just a few bucks.

2 Likes
#66

good thing you att-ed me, there’s a quick answer. Tell Gatekeeper they’re OK.
Here’s my collection of Catalina gatekeeper instructions :slight_smile:
I’ve got one report that says you can do a re-scan within Logic’s plugin manager, and then as you run ‘reset and re-scan selection’ you can go to system prefs/security and it’ll show that Gatekeeper stopped the plugin from opening but there was an option for ‘open anyway’. If you’re able to do it that way the plugin will pass validation in Logic.
If that doesn’t work, the Terminal command to run will be like this (if you have the NewUpdates folder open on your desktop):

sudo xattr -d -r com.apple.quarantine ~/Desktop/NewUpdates/*

sudo (you’ll supply your password) lets you do administrator stuff
xattr -d removes the attribute ‘com.apple.quarantine’ from things,
the -r means recursive so it will go into subfolders and anything in NewUpdates, so don’t point this at your whole hard drive :slight_smile:

6 Likes
#67

This is dope, is it all passive? No amp inside?

#68

Thank you so much for the info!

#69

for plug ins i love using the Klevgrand DAW Cassette/DAW LP/Degrade. A lot of fun stuff.

also aberrant DSP has a great cassette emulation. the random drop outs are so much fun.

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#70

Klevgrand’s lo-fi plugins rule! I also really like Bad Tape by Denise – it’s a brutally unsubtle effect, which is what I want when emulating old tape.

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#71

In addition to using dictaphones for the tape distortion, I’ve been surprised at how good it can sound to sample from their built in speaker. There’s something magical that happens with sound from small speakers being driven too hard that you then feed into effects like reverbs to make them sound bigger again.

I’ve discovered I like the sound of some of my tracks on instagram better when they come out of my iPhone’s built in speaker as it distorts surprisingly nicely. I really should get round to “reamping” with that!

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#72

Forever looking for one of these…

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#73

I generally prefer Wavesfactory Cassette, but Bad Tape is fun for its somewhat bizarre saturation and more extreme noisiness :slight_smile:

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#74

In general it seems that in my part of the world dictaphones/tapedecks/uhers et al are very difficult to find in thrift stores. But record stores are selling Cassette releases steadily. Heck, a friend found an untouched original yellow splashproof walkman for 3 euro in a kids store-out in nowhere :flushed:
I just remember having a 4track walkman with a guitar line in, distortion, chorus and and a belt clip :laughing: you could track 3 channels down onto the last remaing-this probably was the best lofi machine i ever had.
I need to step up my tape digging game…

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#75

ok so we know how to make low fidelity recordings, but do we know why ?

** drops mic **

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#80

I see a few reasons:

Depth of field: Producer/mixer Tchad Blake seems to favour a blend of lofi/hifi-sounds in a mix because he finds it more interesting and fascinating. I also see a possibility in lofi to allow focus to specific sounds while others are allowed to blur in the background. There’s some Bob Dylan quote from when he’s listening to a mix and he turns to the engineer and say: “Man, you messed up. You can hear everything.”

Gel: Noise/hiss can also gel a mix together. Make it less sterile.

Messy is interesting: I just finished the book Messy by Tim Harford. Funnily, it’s sold with different subtitles: “The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives” and " How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World. I really appreciated it. In the end it discussed playgrounds for children, and how children often will turn down the neat and orderly playgrounds and prefer the danger and chaos of a nearby building site etc. Listening to the early demos of Jai Paul the other day I figured it was exactly the messiness and creative exploration that made them so appealing.

The magic of potential: There’s that mixing advice that we should sometimes leave the studio and listen to a mix from another room. Sometimes we can’t see the forest for the trees etc. A powerful tune always seemed to come through even on a lousy fm-radio with a weak signal coming in. In the same way demos can be more fascinating than the finished piece. It’s like the half-finished leaves something for the listener to imagine.

Wabi-sabi: The perfect imperfection. In a world of AI, autotune and cheap gloss error and clumsiness will soon be our way to stay human and interesting.

… and of course it’s always an esthetic choice, as well as a tradition.

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#81

I use it for contrast. ITB for glossy high frequencies against Cocoquantus noise. It’s a texture thing for me.

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#82

I was thinking exactly the same thing! I have never seen any cassette, dictaphone, or reel to reel equipment in any thrift/junk/charity shop in my area. Maybe all of the other local lofi musicians get to the good stuff before me.

Although I have a couple of dictaphones I am recently finding it more interesting to pick and choose the elements of using tape that I like and emulate them in other ways. I have read that to people who use real tape, digital or pedal emulations can sometimes come off as a bit exaggerated, but I’m sure that I’m not the only one who finds these exaggerations sonically appealing. I find particular joy in rigging up various jerky, inconsistent vibrato sounds that take inspiration from tape in some respects but couldn’t really be called tape emulations.

1 Like
#83

@active - this is the bare minimum to get a sound out - the wafer contact mic came with two wires to a “volume” knob, and two to a quarter-inch jack, seen here – https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07KZKLYGB/

I pre-amped through a fender pocket amp and that was just enough to get the sound out to the laptop. I expected a more cascading, old-reverb resonance then it delivers, instead it resulted in a mild noise maker. Maybe it could be improved with bass guitar strings and a heavier box(?). OTOH this cost under $10 US and was finished within an hour… You can hear it here - https://soundcloud.com/cryptohelix/president-pandemic-disquiet0435

#85

I think this is exactly it. I do everything ITB, which gives everything I produce a sterile sheen that begs to be roughed up. It’s ironic – when I started making music in the 90s I recorded everything to tape on a lowly Portastudio and I would have given anything to have the mind-blowing recording possibilities that I have now with Ableton. And yet, now I spend quite a lot of time dialing in just the right amount of distortion and lo-fi grit to make things sound less pure.

(Unlike many of my fellow Lines members, I don’t have any hardware equipment. I wonder if that’s the big benefit of hardware – modular gear [even the non-analog stuff] seems to have that grit/lack of purity already built into it, in a good way.)

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