How lo-fi beats work

Lo-fi hip-hop sounds like a mood more than a genre, which makes it seem hard to take apart. It is not. It is four ideas, and you can hear each one separately.

1. A slow beat that leans back

Here is the drum part on its own. Two bars, 78 beats per minute.

Look at the kick, the top row. It lands on beat one, as you would expect, and then again on step seven, a little before beat three. That early second kick is what gives the beat its lazy lurch forward.

The other half of the feel is swing. Every second sixteenth note is played slightly late, so the hats go long, short, long, short instead of ticking evenly. If you want the full story of why that feels good, read what swing is.

2. A backbeat that whispers

In most music the snare cracks on beats two and four. Lo-fi keeps those two hits, because without them there is nothing to nod to, but swaps the snare for something small: a rim click, a finger snap, a muffled tap.

The beat keeps its skeleton and loses its aggression. That is most of what "chill" means.

3. Chords with one more note

A basic chord is three notes: start on a note of the scale, skip one, take the next, skip one, take the next. Musicians call those the root, the third and the fifth.

Lo-fi does that one more time and adds a fourth note, the seventh. That is the whole secret.

Three note chords sound certain. Four note chords sound like they are thinking about something. The extra note sits close to the root, and that slight crowding is the warmth you are hearing.

4. A loop that never quite lands

Put those chords in the order 2, 5, 1, 6 and something useful happens. The second chord pulls toward the fifth, the fifth pulls toward the first, which is home, and then the sixth chord wanders off again just in time for the loop to restart.

It never fully arrives, so it never needs to end. That is why you can leave it on for three hours.

And then you take the shine off

The last ingredient is not musical at all. Turn down the high frequencies of every instrument with a low-pass filter. In the playground that is the Brightness slider: drag it left and an electric piano turns into a memory of an electric piano.

Add a little echo, keep the bass simple and low, and resist the urge to add more. Lo-fi is mostly restraint.

Try it

Collect the free Lo-fi afternoons pack, drop Rainy day into a project, and then break it. Straighten the swing to zero and hear the life drain out. Swap the rim click for a real snare and hear the mood leave the room. You will understand the genre better in five minutes of vandalism than in an hour of reading.