Is this what a lo-fi album cover looks like?

I tried to learn how to make lo-fi music — Part 1

Note: I don’t know anything about music production

Update: I wrote a follow-up piece about how things went 8 months later. You can read it here.

If you spend any time on the internet, you probably heard about ChilledCow’s “lofi hip hop radio — beats to relax/study to”, a 24/7 LoFi hip-hop stream on YouTube. At the time it went live, people looking for non-intrusive music to listen to while doing focus-heavy activities flocked to the channel. Soon after, other equally good channels popped up and, for a moment, LoFi hip-hop music was popular. Not that it isn’t anymore, but people seem to talk about it less than they did some time back.

So, I was listening to a lo-fi hip hop radio on Spotify a few weeks ago while working and noticed something: although I enjoy the songs and their warm and nostalgic feel, some of them had too many effects on top of each other, which sounded (to me) somewhat annoying when trying to focus on my job. Then, on my lunch break, I started searching about these effects, so I could filter the music I didn’t like from the playlist. I didn’t find the names of those effects; instead, I found a lot of people talking about how to make lo-fi music. Then, an idea lit up in my head: I don’t have to listen to things I don’t like if I make my own music.

First, some context about me: I’m not a music producer nor a musician. I studied music in music schools, intermittently, for about 10 years in total. The studies never went far because of the interruptions between them (after all, life happens and some hobbies suffer for this). I consider myself a pretty decent guitarist, a long time ago I knew a thing or two about music theory, and that’s it. I’m not a composer, an audio engineer or anything like that.

Knowing the little I know and seeing the comments people made about lo-fi music production, the investment required (time and money-wise) didn’t seem that high. After all, lo-fi means low fidelity, so imperfections in the process wouldn’t be undesirable, as opposed to hi-fi (or hi-fidelity) music, where the sound has to be perfectly balanced.

So there I went, searching for the tools required to make lo-fi music. It’s important to say here that there are two ways to make…