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Headback is back in the DarkLab™ to deliver a thick slab of tape drenched lofi house. Start with a simple Grain & Ripley tape wobbled chord, layer up your sound with Europa’s lush pads, and let BVX add a sentimental tinkling touch to those chords.

With Reason 13, there are plenty new toys in the toybox with Polytone & Ripley but Ron might just surprise you with beats from a drum machine you haven’t touched in a while….Serve it up with some sweet tape stretched vocals for deep nostalgic lofi vibes.

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Requires Reason+ and Kilohearts ‘kHs Delay’

 

Transcript

What’s up, folks? It’s your man Ron Headback, and welcome back to the DarkLab. It’s been a while, but this time we’re going to be doing some lo-fi and ambient house. It’s going to sound a bit like this. And you can download all these combinators to put into your own tracks, so let’s dive into the rack and see how we’re building this.

Now, if you’re a fan of lo-fi tracks like “Wanna” by DJ Boring, you’ll notice that they start in this really simple space of just a nice droning, kind of tape-wobbled chord. Now, how we’re doing this is we’re using Grain, which is really, really good for stretching out and elongating any chord sound that you have. So we’ll just check it out, just on its own first, without the wobble — pretty simple, it sounds quite nice.

But we want that kind of lo-fi, tapey, retro sound, so what we’re using here is Ripley, which I’ve been having a lot of fun with — it has its built-in wobble feature, which is pretty cool. And what we’re doing here is on 3/16, and normally for this kind of wobble effect you’re not going to use so much feedback — I’m just kind of washing things out a bit, because it is lo-fi. And it’s pretty neat that you have the noise feature as well, so you can get that kind of tapey hiss going on. So we’ll just switch this on and check what it’s like. Now, what I’ve done is I’ve mapped the wobble up to a controller here, so you can have as much wobble, or as little, as you like — you don’t want to go too crazy with it and things wobbling around all over the place, but that might be the vibe you’re going for.

Now, what we’re also going to be doing with this — sometimes when you’re switching the sync rates on a delay, you get that kind of like, you know, like the tape is just kind of chewing up a bit — this kind of style. I dig that, and I was wanting to find a way to use it, but the thing is, it doesn’t really fit in time. So a neat thing that you can actually do with Grain is get a kind of similar effect. Now, what you want to do here is, with the oscillator, you’re going to set your waveform to the random one, like so, and then we’re going to control the modulation of this to come through the envelope — I’ve just drawn a really messy pattern here, but you can use some of the presets that are there.

So what this is going to be doing — if you notice, in the matrix here, this envelope is going to be controlled by the oscillator mod. Now, if this all sounds pretty confusing, pretty much you’re switching on the oscillator and then cranking up the modulation rate, and this kind of gives a nice chewed-tape kind of feel — just adding to that nice tapey feel.

And next up, if you want to go a step further with that kind of noisy tape feel, we have a Thor that’s running concurrent with the Grain, and this is if you’re getting things to go really lo-fi — we have here “Noisy Tape.” So this is maybe a little bit too much, but what this is, is a Thor with just a white noise preset. So if you want to really go overboard and have that kind of layer of fuzz going on in the background, you can crank this up — but use it sparingly.

So we’re going to be looking at our main chord, and I’m calling this one “Crying Chord” — and you keep on watching, you’ll find out why. Now, this is coming to us courtesy of Europa — it’s just one of the standard presets in there, it’s called “Indie Gamer.” Now we’re going to be doing a whole bunch of stuff with this — you know, grab a spin, we’ll get through this together, you can download this and find out how it’s working.

But a thing I want to start with, that’s maybe a little hidden feature some of you haven’t picked up on — sometimes when you’re using Chord Sequencer, or you’re maybe bashing away on the pads and something’s not working out for you, or you have some MIDI from a pack or something you’ve been working with that you quite like — in this case, I had the Grain chord at the beginning, I really liked it, so I exported it and ran it through an audio-to-MIDI converter, then brought that into Reason.

Now, what I’ve actually got here is MIDI from the drone chord — it wasn’t exactly working perfectly the way I wanted, so I messed around with it a bit. But because I have this in MIDI, I’m not going to get all the advantages of Chord Sequencer — for example, routing the root note out, and other CV features. But this is a neat little thing you can do when you’re in that kind of situation. I’m just going to reset this device and put it onto empty, and what you want to do is go to Edit, then Learn, and then this is actually going to record in the chords that you have here in MIDI. So we’ll go back to the rack, and we’re going to have to switch as it moves on to the next chord — so you see the kind of thing I’m doing here if we get into split view.

Just click off Learn, and then Edit Chord, and then what we have is just that MIDI chord, and we play around with it in Chord Sequencer — we could even take copies of that and put it into the next one here, paste, transpose it up a little touch. So I’m sure you’ve all got these MIDI packs, or just bits of MIDI sitting around, and maybe the vibe you’re wanting, you’re not quite getting from Chord Sequencer — so there’s a little hack for you, for getting those chords into Chord Sequencer.

Now, with our “Indie Gamer” Europa chord, we’re going to be doing a bit of parallel processing — if you’re not familiar with this, you can check out some of my other videos, and you’ll see how that’s done, plus you have the combinator to download and play with. So what we have here is just the completely clean, natural version of the Europa, so we’ll check that.

Now, we want to really celebrate those chords and have them stretching across our mix. So first up, we have what I’m calling “Coral Wobble,” and this is coming to us via the Echo and Audiomatic — so we’ll just listen to this on its own. Now, what we’re doing here with the Echo is quite a similar tape-wobble effect — it’s not exclusive to Ripley, but it’s pretty handy the way Ripley has it built in, so you have to do a few little tweaks with the Echo. What you have to do is take the delay time right down, take everything right down there, and the feedback, and then you turn on the wobble and season that to taste with your dry and wet. So what we’re getting here is a kind of copy of our chord, but it’s gently wobbling away.

So that’s a neat wobble going on there. A thing we also want to do, because it starts to get a little thin, is bring in Audiomatic with the “Bottom” setting on, and that really thickens it out.

Now, like I was saying, we really want to celebrate and get as much as we can out of this chord, so what we’re going to be doing next is bringing in Polar — and this is just one of the standard settings in the library, called “Bright White Swing.” I’ve done some little tweaks here: Shifter 1 is set to seven semitones, and Shifter 2 is also set to seven, and what that’s going to give us is a kind of seventh jump to things. So we’ll check that.

Now, naturally, the chords you’re using might not fit a seventh, but that’s where you can tweak the shifter — you can maybe put it to a fifth or a third. So when we layer that up with our “Coral Wobble” and the clean signal, we’re really getting a rich chord.

So, when I got to this stage doing the track, I was kind of like, well, I want to move on and do a lead for this — but then I had that “what if” moment: what could I use, like, off-label? Take something, grab it, put it in, see how it works. And in this case, it was BVX. There’s a preset in there called “Carrier Pad,” and I’ve messed around with this a touch. What this is doing is generating, of all things, a lead for us — I kind of locked in on this one, because I was planning on making a lead anyway, and then sticking this in, it just came out really sweet. So we’ll check what this is like.

Now, how this is working: within here we’re carving out all the bottom end of the sound, so it’s just the higher EQ that’s being used. And with the Synth Carrier, what this is doing is the harmonic mix is taking up the 7th, the 12th, plus the 12th and 7th — and that’s generously nudging them up. So what BVX is doing is cutting out all that low end, and really bringing things up into the sky. What we actually do is take the Mod and the Carrier down — but you can dial that in a touch — and we already have a couple of copies of our chords.

Now, of course, all this is coming through Ripley, and we’ve got a generous 3/16 here with delay — we’re not doing that much, we’re just kind of carving out the higher end of things. And it was kind of strange, I was wondering if I could bounce this around a touch, so I used Rotor — and without it, it sounds a bit softer. Well, with Rotor on there, it’s giving it a bit of crunch and a bit of a slightly lo-fi sound, so you can use that one, season to taste.

So, who’d have thought it — you can just take your chord, stick BVX on it, carve out those low-end frequencies, have the harmonics of the Synth Carrier really bring it up, and you’ve just generated yourself a lead. Another really cool thing is playing with the Format on this, as you get some slightly crazy things going on with the BVX — so I’ve just put the controllers up here, and we’ll see how that’s sounding.

It’s quite nice to take that really high up and then step it down — I’ve called this one “Cry Format,” because it’s a nice, rich chord, but then there’s this kind of crying, tinkling thing going on in the top.

So with that really rich chord, this is just big, and have a bassline with it. Now, what we’re doing here is I’ve got a nice fat sub coming on with Monotone. Now, pretty basic stuff here — it’s the usual thing of taking a bassline generator and then syncing the root note CV in, and that’s coming from the actual Chord Sequencer. We just come down here — that’s Root Note CV in, and then that’s going to the root note out of the Chord Sequencer, which keeps our bassline in key with things. Now we’ll just check it on its own — we also have a bit of Scream here, we’ll just disable this so you can hear what it sounds like on its own.

Now, that’s sounded a touch flat — we might want to have that as a lull or an introduction — but if we bring the Bassline Generator through some Echo, what we have here is a step-length sync of 14, and then we’re taking the pitch up by 12 semitones, and that’s adding a nice bounce to our sound. We’ve got a controller there for you — “Bounce” — so you can disable it or enable it. So we’ll just bring this on.

So it’s a far more interesting, rolling bassline. And if you really want to have things richened up, we have Scream here, and this is using tape, of all things, because we’re going lo-fi — and you’ll notice the difference between this enabled and disabled. So that really deepens things up.

So okay, this is going to have to have a beat put on it, and this is where we’re going to be using a drum machine that I bet none of you are touching. For our beat, you want to take a guess at what we’re using? Just check it — boomph, nope. For this we are using Rytmik. Now, the reason I’m using this is because I think it’s kind of overlooked, and it reminds me of a situation like back in the day when I was writing tracks trying to find drum machines — you know, back in the late ’90s, early 2000s, everyone had been going out and buying all the secondhand drum machines they could find, like 909s and 808s. So whenever I was passing a secondhand shop, the minute I’d see a drum machine, I’d buy it, check it out, see what it’s like.

So, one of my first drum machines was a Zoom RhythmTrack RT-123 — it wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t the worst either, and it got some kind of interesting sounds out of it. The ethos with it was I’d put it into guitar pedals, mess around with it, patch it, and get some pretty interesting beats out of it. And that’s kind of similar with Rytmik here, because I don’t know if the folks at Reason, when they were designing this, had some of those drum machines in mind, but it’s pretty cool for getting that older-school kind of sound — and the kicks in it are pretty darn good, there’s a nice 909 kick here that’s really meaty.

So with our beat, we’re just going to start out with the kick. And quite often, when I’m doing sort of lo-fi stuff, I want to have these really boisterous beats — you kind of have a double-tap here at the beginning, not all the time, I’ve got that on 50% probability, and then a little triplet at the end to give things a bit of a knock — 63%, or 48%. So you get this kind of feel.

Now, with that, what we’re going to want to do is bring in our hi-hats — so I’ll just have this, and these are just kind of very simple hats, but I’m getting a little bit of a “cha-cha-cha” here towards the end, and that’s again taken with probability — 64, 48, 42 — and that’s just on our last hat. So it kind of sounds like this.

Now, of course, we’re going to need our clap — for this one, just use one of the standard claps we’ve got in there, and we’re kind of in between our first and second clap, we’ve got that kind of double snap. So that’s going to sound like this.

Now, like that old Zoom RhythmTrack, Rytmik’s got some pretty crazy toms and bongos — so we have here a low conga, and a high conga, like this. Now, another cool thing with Rytmik is — you’ll notice there, things are sounding a bit off, and that’s because we’re using a delay at a quarter note that’s dotted, so it’s going to be a bit out of time. So we’ll just check this all together.

Now, no beat is complete without its effects — this one’s been a bit crazy, because I really wanted to mash things up. So first off, we just have a bit of Reverb, just to add some space in the background — that’s using “Reverb All Going to Church,” but cranking up the wet, giving it a bit of space and room. You hear there, that high conga is already sounding a bit more interesting.

What we want to do next, and this is kind of really roughing things up, is taking a layer of this through Audiomatic, using the “Cracked” preset — kind of be sparing with this, because it can really begin to crack and crunch. And that’s really giving flavor to those low and high congas.

Now, just to take it a step further — as if it needs it, but you know, I just wanted to — because Audiomatic with the “Cracked” preset is kind of taking things a bit lower, but if you use Scream with the Warp setting, which a lot of folks might not use because it sounds too noisy, just do a bit of a low cut, boost the mid, and just a touch on the high — that is sounding like this.

So, there you go — who’d have thought, if you’re using Rytmik, you can get some really lo-fi, grunty beats to accompany your track. Now, I was really keen to use Polytone when it came out, but I just couldn’t decide, because there are so many different sounds, so many pads and basses and plucks and leads and such. And for this track, I wanted another lead that was going to accentuate that kind of tinkling, crying chord we had in Europa — but I couldn’t really decide, I was like, okay, I want to use a pad, I want to use a lead, I’m not too sure. So again, off-label use — remember our bassline we used with the sub? We’ll just jump up to that.

Sometimes you can get quite interesting melodic elements by using Bassline Generator — this was just 16 steps. If we jump down to what I’m calling “Poly-Tears,” because again it’s a kind of crying sound, I’m actually just using one of the string presets here — we’ll check it out.

It’s kind of a rather subdued, mellow-sounding string there, but I was like, well, I need something kind of lead-y. So what I’ve done with that Bassline Generator pattern is just crank this up to 32 steps, and we’ll play this back — because sometimes it’s interesting to take a bassline and run it through a string or a pad. So, something like this — it’s still sounding a bit stringy.

So what I’m doing with this is taking it through a Polar, to kind of warp things up, ’cause it’s still sounding quite low — and this is using sevenths and octaves. What it has here is Shifter 1 at seven semitones, and then on the next shifter that’s 12 — so this is sounded like so. I kind of wanted to have that a bit staccato, because we want a bit more rhythmic and melodic, and what better to use for that than a bit of Alligator? So I just check this.

So that’s a nice, dancing, jangling little lead we have there. And another neat thing with Polytone is using the A and B for the layer balance, because you can get some different sounds on those — this one, just playing with the filter, was making things a bit too noisy, but playing on the B, it was sounding a bit more interesting. And what I’m doing here, because I wanted those midtones accentuated from the Alligator — see how it’s pulsing there, the more frequent pulse going on — so what I have here is the CV output from that gate, and I’m going to bring that in. Now, I’m just using Robotic Bean here to control and mute things, but basically that Gate 2 is coming to the mix, or mix-morph, of the Polytone.

So as you can see now that I’ve enabled this, I had it muted there, and as I enable it, you’ll see how it kind of switches on and off sharply — and you can see here the A and B flicking to and fro. So that’s sounding a bit more accentuated on the B layer, and bringing up the filter frequency on the B layer sharpens things out a touch.

And of course, to really add to all that jangle, we’re using three-against-four with Ripley — this time I’m not going to use the wobble, but I could, it kind of gets things jangling a bit too much. And here we’re using a ping-pong with 3/16 and one-quarter, so that’s really making things dance around — and we’ll bring it in with our “Crying Chord” and see how that’s pairing things up. So that’s adding a nice alternative to the crying lead we generated via BVX — so that’s kind of a lull, or just a different point in the track.

Now, a real signature of lo-fi tracks — and it kind of gets that tapey, nostalgic feel — is those stretched or wonky vocals, and you want to have things that are either really pitched down or really pitched up. Now, for this I’m using Mimic — if you’ve just been using Mimic for dropping samples in and playing it, that’s all you’re using it for, stop, and try the multi-slice mode, the speed settings, and the vocal stretch on this, with the formant, because you get some really interesting stuff. This is what this vocal originally sounded like — it was pretty harsh.

But what I did here was take the speed up a touch, but then really jack up the formant of it — and that’s sounding like so, we’ll just bring that in. Now, that is from a far longer sample — there’s a whole lot going on in this one, check here.

So, with the multi-slice mode, you can really just take little bits and parts of the song, and then as you’re going on to another slice, you can copy in the same vocal track, but then pitch it down, put the speed down, and then the formant down — so you’re getting — see, you can get some really interesting ranges with that going on. Also, just jumping back to that female vocal that’s going on — you can bring in Polar and take the shifter right down, and you’re getting a male accompaniment to the female vocal. So what I’ve done here is the volume of Shifter 1 — that’s the lower version — is going to increase here, on the dial called “Male,” and that’s going to bring up the volume of this.

So, I’m sure you’ll agree, that’s some real nice sounds to layer together. If you like this track, you can go and grab it from my Bandcamp, or better yet, the combinators are there for you to download, and you can make something yourself. So I hope this gives you many reasons for using Reason. I’ll catch you in the next one, peace — and we’ll play this one out.