How to make Microtonal Lo-Fi Hip Hop

so today we're gonna check out a couple of different easy ways of making lo-fi hip-hop using micro tonal harmony now our Western system of music is based on twelve-tone equal temperament which means that we have 12 equally spaced notes in the octave all core progressions all melodies everything really is based on these twelve notes there are many other systems that we could use and many other cultures have used them for thousands of years but western music is dominant and we are so in culture to that sound that anything outside of twelve-tone equal temperament has the general tendency to sound out of tune we have an out-of-tune player here now fortunately for us lo-fi hip-hop music is built on the aesthetic of degraded to cassette tapes and tape machines which also have the tendency to make the music sound kind of out of tune it's part of the sound of the style my thought is that we could take the out of tune feeling that we have from listening to micro tonal music and just slot it into the aesthetic of lo-fi hip-hop so let's try it the first micro tonal system that we're going to use exploits the age-old question what is the note that's in between C and C sharp well the answer of course is C half-shirt now how do we get C half sharp well the way that we get it is by adding another keyboard to our set up we're going to tune this keyboard a quarter tone sharp from the bottom keyboard and that's actually really easy to do in a digital audio workstation we're just gonna load up a new patch and then retune it up $0.50 which is the equivalent of a quarter turn now we can play in the cracks between notes we have doubled the total number of notes that we can play we can play a full 24 note chromatic scale so I've loaded up a wonky beat let's let's make some music with this so that's not super in the aesthetic that we're going for what should we do now personally I've had the most luck creating music with this quarter tone system by switching chords between the two keyboards that way each individual chord will still sound super nice to us but then there's this like weird microtonal distance between the chords check it out I love the sound of that it sounds so spooky and different than anything that you can normally get in twelve-tone equal temperament there's a smoothness that occurs between the chords that I really love it's almost as smooth as the shave that you'll get from today's sponsor harrys.com now fans of my channel know that I used to not shave as much before getting in front of the camera that has since changed because I think the smooth look is much better suited for me that came with its own annoyance though because refills for razors are incredibly expensive sometimes they cost between thirty and forty dollars for an eighth pair now enter the subscription service harrys.com six years ago Harry's founders Jeff and Andy bought a factory in Germany so they could sell razors directly to millions of men at a fair price Harry's was kind enough to send me a starter kit the starter kit included a weighted handle with a textured rubber grip a five blade razor cartridge as well as a very nice foaming shave I am a fan of the fact that Harry's donates 1% of all of its proceeds towards men's mental health organizations so if you'd like Harry's right now is doing a deal on its trial set you can redeem your trial set for just three dollars by clicking the link in the description and you too can be as smooth as these quarter tone chord progressions anyway the way that I played bass guitar to that groove is by retuning my E and D strings up a quarter tone you can do that with a tuner by setting the reference to 453 hurts and then tuning normally there we go we have an out-of-tune player at least of the situation where you can play some cool like Arabic sounding lines by using that 2nd scale degree that's been lowered by 1/4 tone like this I mean that sort of thing is pretty neat but at the same time that's not the aesthetic that we're trying to capture right now what they should tell you is that the same kinds of tuning systems can be used for wildly different kinds of contexts not all microtonal music sounds the same nor should it anyway what other kinds of systems could we use well there's so many of them out there but I'm gonna hone in on just one for right now because I think it's especially good for this sort of chill vibe I'm talking of course about dividing the octave into 10 evenly spaced notes [Music] this is a little trickier to get in digital audio workstation so though there are a couple of different ways I'm going to be using a plug-in right now called piano tech to help me first I'll load it up onto a track I'll go to temperament I'll go to make equal temperament in type 10 scale degrees and now my piano is going to be tuned to 10 tone equal temperament now why are we using 10 tone equal temperament well there's a really interesting subset of it called the equi pentatonic scale this is a 5 note scale where each of the scale degrees is exactly the same distance from one another it sounds like this you can contrast that to a minor pentatonic scale which sounds like this it sounds similar but kind of different and novel and new and the echo pentatonic scale the distance between each of the notes is 240 cents or roughly a whole-step plus a quarter tone these kinds of intervals are used in the roughly echo pentatonic tuning of certain African edia phones like the Ghanaian Neil which is kind of like a super buzzy xylophone it's a fascinating super malleable super stable super melodic sound that we just never can use because it doesn't fit within the twelve tone equal tempered system but we're gonna use it to create some more chill beats so one of the things that you might notice is that the equi pentatonic scale maps to the whole tone scale of the regular twelve tone keyboard and similar to how our twelve tone system has two whole tone scales there are two equiped two tonic scales in the ten tone equal-tempered system you can contrast the two if you want to get a little bit more harmonic movement in the sound going back and forth between the two equiped teutonic scales so let's try adding a bass line underneath that unfortunately it's not that easy to tune our bass to ten tone equal temperament so instead we're gonna use another plug-in I'm gonna use zebra which allows micro tuning I first find a bass tone that I like [Music] chill yeah that might work then I'm gonna go to micro tuning and then select a tuning file there's actually a selection of tuning files that I've linked in the description in case anybody wants to experiment with some of this micro turning stuff so now I'm gonna play bassline I'm actually gonna swap out the keyboard just cuz I find that this keyboard is a little bit better for bass lines slighty type stuff I'm just gonna mess around I don't really know the ins and outs of this system and I think that's the fun and exciting thing I'm approaching it completely it has a newbie and that's kind of fun there is a certain magic to that that's kind of the exciting thing for me with all of this stuff it's always discovery there is always a new thing to learn that I had never heard before so anyway I'm gonna mess around and come up with a bass line okay [Music] it's interesting for me when I'm playing this on the base patch it sounds almost more major pentatonic II the equi pentatonic scale versus on the roads whereas feeling more minor pentatonic ee it's like a pentatonic scale is exactly halfway in between major and minor it's super cool anyway I'm gonna mess around a little bit okay let's let's add like one more layer on top of this and call it a day stew I don't know my cartooning [Music] I don't know just having some fun here I hope this video has given you a couple ideas on how you might approach making modern beats using micro channel music I'm not an expert at this if you really want to get into this stuff I suggest checking out the music of seviche he's been doing this stuff for a much longer time than I have I want to say thank you again to Harry's for sponsoring this video and yeah guys thank you so much for watching [Music] these

Channel: Adam Neely

Views: 1,024,770

Rating: 4.9675846 out of 5

Keywords: adam, neely, jazz, fusion, bass, guitar, lesson, theory, music

Id: H4KIwA8O9LU

Length: 10min 55sec (655 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 14 2019

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[u/chestersoutherland]

thought he didn't like lofi hip hop? pretty sure he said it was "smooth jazz for millenials"... regardless this shit slaps like a mofo