A lo-fi hip hop beat is a small number of parts done in a particular way: a slow, swung boom-bap groove, a short jazzy chord loop full of 7ths and 9ths, a simple bass, and a layer of tape and vinyl wear over the top. Here is what each part is and how they fit together.
Works in any DAW, with any sampler or synth. Nothing here needs a particular plugin.
Two things at once: a relaxed hip hop groove, and a layer of wear that makes the recording sound old. The groove is the hip hop. The wear is the lo-fi. Take the wear off a good lo-fi beat and you have a clean jazzy hip hop loop. Put the wear on a bad loop and you still have a bad loop, now with crackle on it.
The ingredients are consistent from track to track:
The character is what earns the name, but the groove and the chords are what make it music. Get those two right first, then age them. Most of the settings people ask about live in a small range:
| Part | Typical | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Tempo | 70 to 90 BPM | Slow enough to feel unhurried, not so slow it drags |
| Swing | 54 to 62% | The offbeats land late, which is the shuffle |
| Drums | Boom-bap | Kick on the 1, snare on 2 and 4, soft hats between |
| Chords | 7ths and 9ths | A short 2 to 4 bar loop, usually electric piano |
| Bass | One note per chord | Follows the root, stays out of the kick's way |
| Top end | Rolled off | A low-pass filter takes the sparkle off everything |
The drums are a boom-bap backbeat played slow and soft. The chords are a short jazzy loop built on extended chords. Both stay simple and repeat, because in this style the loop is the point.
Boom-bap is a plain backbeat. Kick on beat 1, usually with a second syncopated kick somewhere before the snare; snare or rimshot on beats 2 and 4; soft closed hats on the offbeat sixteenths. That is the whole skeleton, and it barely changes from track to track.
The trick is keeping everything soft. Roll the highs off the hats and snare so nothing is bright or crisp, and a short room reverb on the snare gives it the thump that the word boom-bap is describing. Keep the pattern to a bar or two and let it repeat.
The jazzy quality comes almost entirely from extended chords. A plain triad sounds clean and poppy. Add the 7th, and the 9th, and the same three roots turn wistful and slightly unresolved, which is the sound. Major 7ths, minor 7ths and dominant 9ths do most of the work.
Electric piano is the classic voice, a Rhodes-style tone, though a soft sampled piano or a clean guitar works too. Voice the chords close together in the middle of the keyboard rather than spread wide, and move as little as possible between them; the voice-leading guide covers that in full. Keep the loop to 2 or 4 bars.
Keep it simple. Usually one note per chord, the root, low and rounded, with maybe a short walk up into the next chord. A soft sine-ish or muted electric bass suits it. The one rule that matters: leave the low end clear where the kick lands, or the bass and the kick fight and the bottom of the mix turns to mud.
This is the layer that turns a clean beat into a lo-fi one. It is tape wow and flutter, vinyl noise, a low-pass filter, saturation, and a little detune, all kept subtle and stacked together rather than any single effect turned up loud.
The wear sits under the music, it does not replace it. It is tempting to reach for crackle and wow first because they are the fun part, but they only flatter a loop that already grooves. Write the beat clean, get it feeling right, then age it.
Swing the timing, vary the velocity, and let notes sit slightly off the grid. A beat quantized hard to the grid is the single most common reason a lo-fi attempt sounds stiff and fake, and no amount of crackle fixes it.
Delay the offbeat sixteenths so they land late. A swing setting somewhere around 54 to 62 percent is the classic shuffle. Straight sixteenths at 50 percent sound mechanical, and that machine-perfect timing is exactly the thing this genre is trying to get away from.
Nudge the snare and some of the hats a few milliseconds late. That lazy, dragging feel is a large part of why the good ones sound relaxed rather than rushed. Do not do it to the kick; keep the kick steady as an anchor and let the parts around it lean back.
Change how hard each hat and note hits. Real playing is never all one volume, and a hat pattern where every hit is identical reads as a machine instantly. A little variation, even a little randomness, makes a repeated pattern breathe.
With everything else loose, keep one element steady, usually the kick or the chord loop, so the ear has something firm to hear the looseness against. Loose against steady sounds human. Loose against loose just sounds out of time.
Loop eight bars of just the drums and the chords and leave it playing for a minute while you do something else. If you catch yourself nodding, it works. If it starts to annoy you, the fix is in the groove and the loop, not in more tape and dust on top.
Most of a lo-fi beat is quick to program. The part that is genuinely hard to fake by hand is the aged, drifting loop underneath: a chord or a sample that keeps moving and wearing out so it never sounds like the same two bars pasted end to end.
SILT is a generative tape-loop instrument. Play a chord or drop a sample in and it wears the loop out with wow, flutter, dust and dropout until it becomes the dusty, evolving lo-fi bed you were after. It runs as an Audio Unit, a VST3, an AAX and a standalone.
It does not program your drums, and it is not meant to. It makes the drifting, aged loop layer that a lo-fi beat sits on. The groove and the chords are yours; SILT is the thing that ages them and keeps them moving.
Free to hear in the browser, no signup. Everything above still works by hand in any DAW, which is rather the point of writing it down.
We write these when there is something worth writing down. One email when a new one lands or a new Tunary instrument ships. No newsletter, no schedule.
Tunary