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17. Giving beats personality with lo-fi and distortion effects

1 There’s nothing like taking a shiny modern drum break and turning it into something fit for a lo-fi-sounding, sample-based track. After loading the files beginning ‘ HipHop…’ into a 90bpm project, start by making the break sound more suited to the music surrounding it using repitching.

2 Here in Live 10, we double-click on the HipHopBreak region, then select Repitch from the clip’s Warp mode menu – this will make the break fit the tempo by adjusting the speed in a similar way to the pitch control on a turntable, giving a lower pitched sound overall. After this, slice the region to a new MIDI track.

3 Open the new MIDI clip, select all the notes, then bring the velocity up to 127 to boost the volume of the drums. Select the first and second kick note in each bar, and move them onto Slice 1 so the main kick consistently triggers via the same audio slice.

4 Make all the snare notes on beats 2 and 4 trigger Slice 6 for a more consistent snare. Next, it’s processing time! We add Kush Audio’s UBK-1 to the main kick ( Slice 1) with the Density and Saturation at 12 o’clock and Compression at 2 o’clock – this fattens the kick up. Next, we’ll process the snare…

5 Cableguys WaveShaper CM is ace for adding grit to any sound – add it to our main snare ( Slice 6) and choose the Hard Distortion preset. The snare pops out, and sounds more ‘rugged’. Pull the Output level down to around -2dB to relevel, then duplicate the drum break’s MIDI clip across the arrangement.

6 We’ll finish by grunging up the entire break – add iZotope Trash 2, then set distortion Stage 1 to Tape Saturation with the Drive at 5 and Output gain set to -10dB. This gives the drum break a slamming, NWA-esque tone. Adding D16’s Decimort 2 (set to the 16-bit 16khz preset) adds 90s sampler flavour.