Vaporwave

What it is

Be clear about what this is: vaporwave usually has no drums of its own. Chuck Person's Eccojams in 2010 and Floral Shoppe in 2011 established the method, which is to take an existing record, slow it to somewhere between 70 and 85 percent, loop four bars of it and add reverb. The drums you hear are the drums the original session played, and since the source material is nearly always eighties or early nineties adult contemporary, quiet storm, smooth jazz or Japanese city pop, those drums came off a LinnDrum, a DMX or a live kit engineered to sound like one. The grid below is not vaporwave's pattern. It is the pattern vaporwave keeps finding, written out at the speed you hear it, so you can see what the slowing actually does to a bar.

What it sounds like

Enormous and slightly nauseous. Slowing a 44.1kHz file to 75 percent drops everything about five semitones and stretches every transient, so a snare that was a crack becomes a soft thump with an audible attack ramp. Cymbals turn into a wash. The reverb that was on the original record gets slowed with it, so a 1.5 second plate becomes a two second hall for free. On top of that people add more: a long hall, a chorus, sometimes a low-pass at 6kHz. Tape hiss from the source vinyl or cassette is left in. The bass is enormous and out of tune with itself. Nothing is quantised, because nothing was programmed.

Key elements

• The source, not the sequencerThe rhythm belongs to whoever made the record being sampled. Choosing what to slow and where to loop it is the compositional act here.
• Stretched transientsAt 75 percent speed a 4ms snare attack becomes 5.3ms, which is enough to move it from a crack to a thump. This is why the drums feel soft.
• A four bar loop with a seamThe loop point is usually audible and left that way. A clean crossfade removes the thing that tells you it is a loop of something else.
• Quiet storm drum programmingThe sources share a house style: kick on 1 and just before beat 4, backbeat on 2 and 4, a ride marking the halves and eighth hats underneath.
• Inherited reverbThe original mix's plate is slowed with everything else. Most of the space in a vaporwave track was already there before anyone touched it.

How to get them

• Slow, do not time-stretchChange the sample rate rather than using an algorithm. Pitch and time have to move together, because the formant sag is most of the effect.
• Pick a source with programmed drumsA LinnDrum or DMX record slows far better than a live kit, because the machine hits are already short and identical and stretch cleanly.
• Loop on the bar, badlyCut four bars at the downbeat with no crossfade. The click at the seam is part of the form, and smoothing it removes the tell.
• If you must program itUse the grid below at 56, which is a 75 bpm quiet storm bar at three quarter speed. Then treat it as a source: bounce it, slow it again, and sample the result.
• Add the second reverbA 6 second hall at 30 percent wet on top of whatever the source already had, with the return low-passed at 6kHz. Two reverbs stacked is the sound.
• Leave the hissNo noise reduction, no de-clicking, no restoration. Every artefact you remove makes it sound more like a track you made and less like one you found.

Reference points

Chuck Person, Macintosh Plus, Blank Banshee, Saint Pepsi, Internet Club, and the Beer on the Rug and Dream Catalogue labels. Reference points for the method, not endorsements, and the source records are somebody else's work.