Traditionally, lo-fi hip hop drums were achieved by using a range of analog sources spanning old vinyl records, cassettes, and vintage drum samplers.
With the advancement in technology, we now have the ability to achieve an almost identical sound from our own laptops. In this tutorial, let’s explore how to make lo-fi hip hop drums using only stock sounds and plugins from FL Studio 20.
This is the final drum sound that we’ll be creating:
Our main ingredients will be the following:
- Harmor (the trial version is available in all copies of FL Studio)
- Fruity Parametric EQ 2
- Soundgoodizer
- Fruity Limiter
Getting started
To begin, let’s open a fresh session in FL 20 and load up three instances of Harmor, assigning each one its own designated mixer channel. Let’s also route these channels to a bus group, in order for us to add signal processing later. We’ll be using these to create the following sounds: a kick, a snare, and a hi hat.
The lo-fi kick
Let’s start with our first instance of Harmor. Go to the top left of the plugin window, click the drop-down menu, and select Presets → Default. This will give you a basic saw wave to start with. Then, navigate to the Envelope window, choose Volume from the drop-down menu, and adjust the waveform to emulate the behavior of a kick sound (a fast attack, short decay, short sustain, and fast release). Once completed, click Enable Envelope to implement your settings.
Click the Volume drop-down menu and select Pitch. Here, we’ll draw a pitch envelope that will mirror our kick waveform (a fast attack, short decay, short sustain, and fast release). You can set the starting point to any semitone of your liking. Again, don’t forget to hit Enable Envelope to implement your settings.
Navigate to the Pitch section of Harmor and adjust the pitch divider to 8 (or to personal taste).
From here, you can also adjust the cutoff and resonance in Harmor, in order to dull or add more punch to the kick. Adjusting the Vol fader also adds amplification and increases the intensity of kick.
On the Kick mixer channel, let’s add the Fruity Parametric EQ 2 in order to clean up some unnecessary low end and high end. I would suggest adding a low cut filter at around 40 Hz to attenuate some of the lows. I also loaded up an instance of the Soundgoodizer plugin to add more saturation and presence to the kick. Lastly, Fruity Limiter can be used to adjust level and tighten up dynamics.
Let’s take a listen to how our kick sounds:
The lo-fi snare
On the second instance of Harmor, go to the top right of the plugin window, click the drop-down menu, and select Presets → Default. In order to make our snare sound, we’ll need a basic white noise wave file. Go to the top left of the Browser workspace window of FL Studio, click the search icon, and type in “white noise.” This should return a result for you under Impulses → Special → White Noise. Once found, simply drag the white noise wave and drop it on top of the instance of Harmor. Navigate to the Envelope window, choose the Volume drop-down menu, and adjust the waveform to emulate the behavior of a snare sound (a fast attack, fairly short decay, fairly short sustain, and fast release). Click Enable Envelope to implement your settings.
Click the Volume drop-down box and select Pitch. Let’s draw a pitch envelope that will mirror our snare waveform (a fast attack, fairly short decay, fairly short sustain, and quick release). You can set the starting point to any semitone of your liking.
As we did with the kick, navigate to the Pitch section of Harmor and adjust the pitch divider to personal taste.
Let’s use the Fruity parametric EQ 2 to clean up the lows and highs, and load an instance of Soundgoodizer to add more saturation and presence to the snare.
Let’s take a listen to how our snare sounds:
The lo-fi hi hat
On our last another instance of Harmor, go to the top right of the plugin window, click the drop-down box, and select Presets → Default. Like when we made our snare sound, we’ll once again need a basic white noise wave file. Let’s drag another white noise wave file onto this instance of Harmor. Then, navigate to the Envelope window, choose the Volume drop-down menu, and adjust the waveform to emulate the behavior of a hi hat (a fast attack, a short decay, a short sustain, and fast release). Click the Enable Envelope button to hear your settings in action.
As we’ve done with the kick and snare, navigate to the Pitch section and adjust the pitch divider to adjust to personal taste. On the Hi hat mixer channel, let’s add the Fruity parametric EQ 2 to cut off some unnecessary low end (hi hats don’t need much lows at all) and clean up the high end. Load up an instance of Soundgoodizer to add more saturation and presence, and add an instance of Fruity Limiter to adjust the level and amplitude.
Let’s take a listen to how our hi hat sounds:
Finally, here’s how the kick, snare, and hi hat sound when put together:
Honorable mentions
Above concludes our tutorial on how to create lo-fi drums in FL Studio 20. Just a few stock plugins, some clever ADSR envelope manipulation, and a relatively simple workflow allowed us to do all of the processing that we needed to do. That said, here are a few additional free or stock plugins that may be worth exploring:
- Fruity Squeeze is s a bit-reducing distortion and filtering plugin. This tool can be very handy for adding more grit and bit reduction to your lo-fi drums.
- iZotope’s Vinyl is a free plugin that’s great for making lo-fi hip hop, especially when used on drums and keys. Typically, I like to drop an instance of it on my drum group bus in order to help “glue” the drums together.
- FL Studio’s Transient Processor (note: only available in the All Plugins Bundle) is a very useful tool for adding more snap and punch to your drums. Using this plugin on individual drum channels (or drum groups) can help your drums cut through the mix.
Do you have any plugins or processing tricks that you use to create your own lo-fi drums? Let us know in the comments below.
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July 16, 2019
