Lo-Fi Hip-Hop

What it is

The direct descendant of jazz rap, minus the rapping. Nujabes and J Dilla are the two ancestors everyone points at, and the streaming-era version that grew out of them is instrumental, endlessly long and explicitly functional: made to be studied to. The production values are inverted on purpose. Tape wobble, tuning drift, cassette hiss and mistimed hits are added rather than removed, because a beat that is slightly wrong is easier to leave running for three hours than one that is exactly right. The swing runs heavier than anywhere else in the family, often past 60 percent, and the drums are deliberately quiet.

What it sounds like

Soft, dusty and slightly seasick. A rimshot or a side stick where the snare would be, a kick with no click on it, and brushed hats at low volume. Over that a piano or Rhodes loop that drifts in pitch, a filtered upright bass, and layers of vinyl crackle, rain or room tone. Nothing is loud. Nothing has a sharp transient. The whole mix is low-passed somewhere between 10 and 14kHz and the stereo image is narrow, and the beat lopes because the offbeat sixteenths are pushed most of the way to a triplet.

Key elements

• The rimshot backbeatA side stick instead of a snare on 2 and 4. It is quieter, woodier and shorter, and it is why lo-fi beats can run for hours without becoming tiring.
• Heavy swing60 to 64 percent, well past the MPC default, so the offbeat sixteenths sit nearly on the triplet. This is the biggest single difference from boom bap.
• Tuning driftSlow pitch modulation on the melodic loop, a few cents either side, imitating a worn tape transport. It is what makes a clean sample sound found rather than made.
• Deliberate imprecisionHits nudged off the grid by ten or twenty milliseconds and velocities that never repeat. Dilla's drum programming worked this way and it is the whole inheritance.
• Texture as a layerCrackle, rain, tape hiss or room tone running continuously under the beat, mixed at around minus 28dB. It joins the elements together and covers the seams.

How to get them

• RimshotA side stick sample, low-passed at 6kHz, with a very short room. Keep it around 90 velocity, well below where a snare would sit. Add a real snare at 30 underneath only if the track needs more body.
• KickSoft, weight near 60Hz, with the click at 2 to 4kHz cut entirely. Then compress with a slow attack so the transient is rounded off rather than emphasised.
• DriftAn LFO on the sample's pitch, plus or minus 8 cents at about 0.3Hz, or a tape emulation with the wow control raised. Then detune a duplicate of the loop by 6 cents and mix it under at minus 10dB.
• FeelSet swing to 62 percent, then drag two or three individual hits per bar 15 milliseconds late by hand. The unevenness on top of the swing is what stops it sounding quantised.
• ShakerOn the offbeat sixteenths at 38 to 50, so the swing is audible in a lane that is not the hats. Two lanes carrying different parts of the roll is how the groove stays open.
• MixLow-pass the master at 12kHz, narrow the stereo image above 8kHz, and cut 2 to 3dB around 3kHz. Then check it is quiet enough that a conversation could happen over it.

Reference points

J Dilla, Nujabes, Knxwledge, Tomppabeats, Idealism, Jinsang and the Chillhop and Lofi Girl catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.