Top 5 Tips For A Lofi Guitar Tone

• How does the guitar fit into lofi music?
• 1. Dedicated lofi effects pedals
• 2. Tape delay
• 3. Valves and Speakers
• 4. Tinkering with the pedal chain order
• 5. Recording techniques

Lofi – short for low-fidelity and sometimes spelled ‘lo-fi’ or ‘lo fi’ – is an ambient, dreamy vibe you’ll find used in a lot of indie rock, hip hop and alternative pop, originating from DIY home studio sound craft. It captures a style that goes against the grain of hi-fidelity, which you might consider to be the squeaky clean, highly produced sounds of a lot of pop music. Imperfections are at the heart of a lofi guitar tone, so getting warbling trails, crackly cleans and a sort of ‘broken toy’ vibe is the aim of the game.

How does the guitar fit into lofi music?

Let’s get the most obvious, meme-able piece of lofi media (but nevertheless filled with excellent music) out the way: have a listen to lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to for the most on-the-nose example of what this sound is all about. You’ll get chill dampened drum beats, smooth warped vinyl guitars and soothing synths to pad out the sound.

In the context of guitar tones, lofi, in general, recreates the unique sound of a warped vinyl record. It also incorporates forms of vibrato, tremolo, delay and light overdrive or fuzz. Sometimes it’s thin, wobbly and abrasive like Mac DeMarco, and other times it’s soft and rounded like Tycho or Hoogway. It can also have a bit of a higher gain kick to it, used by Boards of Canada and Covet to varying degrees. Even some of the biggest bands in the world like Radiohead have dipped into lofi. A lot of the sonic qualities these artists have sprinkled into their music can be traced back to The Beach Boys, who utilised spring reverb, tremolo, echo, Leslie Speaker effects, and very rich, warm preamps.

A lofi tone is equally adept at setting the mood of song or providing a smaller touch of tonal nuance. Most of the following ideas work well with both guitar and synth, so don’t be afraid to experiment; lofi is all about finding new ways to create atmosphere through the gear you have at your disposal.

1. Dedicated lofi effects pedals

There’s a stompbox for virtually every sound and genre, and lofi is no exception. You get a bit of everything from a dedicated lofi pedal: vibrato, compression, delay and crunchy gain, all of which contribute to a warped vinyl tone. This is the perfect option for players after a simple one box solution.

Boutique originators ZVEX make the Instant Lo-Fi Junky, which for many is the gold standard. It nails the wavy vibrato trails and is capable of a heavy compression that squeezes your tone as if it flowed from an old record player. Other great shouts are the Caroline Kilobyte 2000 – a tape delay with an extensive gain range – and Source Audio ARTIFAKT, packing loads of glitchy modulation, echoey reverb, crackly delay and radio style bitrate reduction flavours. Mooer’s Lofi Machine is a simple and accessible way to get Nintendo style bitcrushing. You’ve also got the JHS Pedals Double Dragon, based on 50-year-old octave divider tech, and the 424 Gain Stage, which is your shortcut to the sounds of a famous Tascam Portastudio recorder heard all over Radiohead, Mac DeMarco, Steve Lacy, Omar Apollo and more recently, Mk.gee records.

Lofi Pedals

2. Tape delay

A key component to most lofi is tape delay. Like any other analogue style effect, tape produces tonal imperfections which suits the under-produced, quirky aesthetic of lofi. Real tape delay can be extremely, so an analogue guitar pedal with a dark degradation to its repeats would works just as well.

Red Panda are the boutique masters of time-based tomfoolery with their Tensor, Raster and Particle pedals all offering a different spin on delay with added pitch shifting. The Strymon Deco and El Capistan gravitate closer to natural vintage tape, while the Electro Harmonix Attack Delay and higher-end Mel9 expand into new emulation territories. If you’re just looking to get an affordable delay, the Tone City Tape Machine is an excellent choice.

Tape Delay Pedals

3. Valves and Speakers

A real valve amplifier or valve amp plug-in is a must-have for the most authentic of lofi tones. Stick to tubes where you can, as solid state amps tend to have a more hi-fi feel to them.

Some amps and amp brands naturally suit lofi, with Vox being the major player. You can get a thin, boxy tone out of the classic AC15 because of its combination of preamp, power amp and smaller speakers in combo models. Alternatives include the more premium Fender Vintage range and the small Supro Delta King amps. Steer away from amps that are too high gain or bass heavy.

EL84 valves are the common choice for a lofi amp. The low clean headroom makes it easier to your saturate your guitar signal at lower volumes. This gives you some nice tonal variety if you balance the gain to spike with heavier picking. In the speaker department, large speakers generally means a larger, more open sound. So let’s keep them small for lofi, no bigger than 10 or 12 inches in diameter for that natural bit of density. From there, it’s really up to you what speaker you choose. Celestion Greenbacks sound great with their midrange bump and slightly restrained highs.

Amps, speakers and valves

4. Tinkering with the pedal chain order

The amp effects loop is an excellent way to get your guitar pedals sounding super clean and pristine, as it places them in between the preamp and power amp. Let’s ditch that.

We want the crunchiness, the artefacts and all the other imperfections that an effects loop eliminates. Let your time-based delay and reverb pedals get a little dirty with a touch of overdrive as they hit the front of the amp.

Try experimenting with your delay and vibrato placed before a drive pedal. Most guides will tell you to put them last in the signal chain, but we’re not after perfection in that sense. The fluctuations of vibrato and the repeats of a delay take on a much grittier edge if you feed them into a low-gain overdrive or fuzz. This is a great way to recreate the vinyl effect without buying a dedicated pedal.

5. Recording techniques

Fight your urges to make your tone sound ‘good’. Great Lofi should sound effortless, even when a lot of effort has gone into making it sound less than perfect with a deep mix of compression, delay and wet-mixed modulation effects. Recording tricks like positioning your mic central to the speaker cone, wider on the rim, or even further away from the amp than usual will give you a different sound. Use a condenser or ribbon mic where you can, as they’re more adept than dynamic mics in detecting the tonal cracks and imperfections you’ve worked into your guitar tone.

If there’s still some tweaking to be done after all this, it’s time to dive into the EQ plug-ins within your DAW. Try applying band-pass filters to remove some of the low and high-end frequencies. Just remember, you’ll want your tone to be more on the mellow side than harsh, so make incremental changes. Applying a lot of filtering can cause ear fatigue. And if you feel you need to flesh out your track with more lofi goodness, try sampling something unusual like a toy piano, bits and bobs around at home or anything you can get your hands on cheaply to bring this quirky DIY sound to life.

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