Chillwave

What it is

Around 2009 a handful of American bedroom producers started putting out records that sounded like they had been recovered from a tape left in a car: Washed Out in Georgia, Neon Indian in Texas, Toro y Moi in South Carolina. A blogger coined the name as a joke and it stuck within about a month. The drums usually come from a sampled loop or a cheap eighties machine, pitched down slightly, drowned in reverb and then run through a wobbling tape emulation. What makes them read as chillwave rather than as indie pop is the timing: the parts are not quantised hard, there is a light shuffle on the sixteenths, and every element is a few milliseconds late against the grid. The genre is closer to the vaporwave end of this family than to the synthwave end, but it plays its own drums.

What it sounds like

Everything is behind glass. The kick is soft, high-passed, with the attack shaved off by a slow compressor, and it sits well back. The snare is a sampled acoustic with a long hall on it, often so wet that the transient disappears entirely and only the tail is audible. Hats are dull and shuffled. Over that: a chorused Juno-ish pad, a sampled vocal chopped and pitched, and a bass that is felt rather than heard. Tape wow at about 0.7Hz runs across everything, so the pitch is never quite stable, and the top end is filtered to somewhere around 9kHz. Half the character comes from a plate reverb turned up past the point where anyone would normally stop.

Key elements

• Shuffled sixteenthsA light swing of around 54 percent, which is nowhere near triplet feel but is audibly not straight. It is what stops the loop sounding drawn in.
• Reverb as an instrumentA 4 second hall at 40 percent wet on the snare, no pre-delay, so the tail arrives before the transient has finished. Print it rather than leaving it on a send.
• Tape wowA slow pitch modulation of about 15 cents at 0.7Hz across the whole mix. Bus it and print it so every element drifts together rather than separately.
• Ghost snaresVery quiet snare hits on the and of 4 and the and of 2 that a real drummer would play without thinking. They are what keeps the loop from feeling programmed.
• Cabasa on the aThe last sixteenth of every beat, quiet, low-passed. It marks the shuffle more clearly than the hats do because it lands where the swing is widest.

How to get them

• Set the swing before anything else54 percent on the whole project. Program the drums into it rather than swinging them afterwards, because sample tails get stretched when you swing a printed loop.
• Soften the kickHigh-pass at 70Hz, then an opto compressor with a 30ms attack so the click is eaten. Sit it about 6dB lower than you think a kick should be.
• Drown the snareA 4 second hall, no pre-delay, 40 percent wet, low-passed at 5kHz on the return. Then compress the wet and dry together so the tail pumps under the next hit.
• Add the ghostsTwo snare hits at velocity 34 to 38, one on the and of 2 and one on the and of 4, alternating between bars so the pair never repeats identically.
• Print the wowTape emulation on the mix bus with wow at 0.7Hz and about 15 cents of depth, flutter off. Record it to a new file so it stops being reversible.
• Filter the topA 12dB low-pass at 9kHz on the master, then add 1dB back at 3kHz so the vocal still reads. The point is not muffled, it is distant.

Reference points

Washed Out, Neon Indian, Toro y Moi, Memory Tapes, Small Black, Ducktails, and the Mexican Summer and Carpark catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not endorsements.