I am obsessing over some specific sounds, where I think low sample rate or bitcrushing is involved in the processing, but I’m not really sure.
Can anyone help with ID’ing the effect being used to get those high frequency artifacts that I love?
Two examples:
Could possibly be digital compression effects (like mp3 smearing), plugins like Goodhertz Lossy, or Aberrant DSP Digitalis can get you these kind of sounds.
Thanks!
Checked the Lossy video, and it does exactly that sound 
I’m thinking how the artists themselves achieved that sound, maybe sampling bad mp3’s, since I’m pretty sure they didn’t just use a plugin (artists in the examples are SND and Earl Sweatshirt).
Could you achieve this effect on an Octatrack?
Samplers back in the days just couldn’t offer better quality 
The second example is from 2015, probably made on a MPC, so it’s not necessarily the gear itself that does it. First example is SND from 2010, don’t know what gear they used though.
Either of them could be a plugin, but the second example is multiple grades of sampling and some resampling so if it’s made on hardware it’s probably in the SP family, most likely an SP-303 because the timbre of the aliasing is pretty unique. It has layers of texture like a fuzzy blanket instead of just a filter or bit reduction on a track which impacts everything the same.
The first one could also be a roland sampler but I don’t know. These days there’s no real reason to assume something wasn’t done in a daw unless you know for a fact that it wasn’t.
True. I’m just asuming MPC because I know he has used one, but could just as well be a plugin in a daw. Same goes for SND.
Another way to get the sound of bad mp3s is to use noise reduction plugins badly.
[Samplers, even very old ones, of course use lossless file formats.]
Interesting, got any suggestions or examples of that? Bad mp3’s is really the sound I’m going for.
I probably wouldn’t recognize it so distinctly if my sp202 didn’t have the same character but there are like 3 grades of sampling being used on that second clip and the MPC doesn’t let you change the sample rate, it also sounds like resampling and sp202 doesn’t have that or a sequencer. It could be a 404 but I kinda feel like the original 404 sounds different than a 303.
I’m just going off those clues because to achieve this with an mpc would require like, another sampler with adjustable sample rate and then resample that into the mpc.
Which is certainly possible, because I do that too. The really metallic artifacts on the percussion on that second one are “lofi 2”, it’s the lowest possible sample rate on an SP. The melody part is more like “lofi 1”, if you want to try and duplicate it in a daw the SP manuals give you the sample rate for each “grade” of sampling, but I do feel like there’s some character to the sound produced by the hardware itself.
Have you tried converting the sound you want to manipulate to a really low bit rate mp3? Perhaps do it a few times. Like, literally create a bad sounding mp3?
I didn’t, but I know I can do that. Was wondering how people achieved the sound without doing this.
…this plugin does it ALL, whenever it comes to ALL SORTS AND FLAVOURS of rate reduction, crushing, crackling, codec crustyness/crispyness, artificial dirstortion/degrading/destruction…
By 2010 all of .snd’s music was being made with Max/MSP iirc, not sure how helpful this is. Their early stuff was made on an EMU E6400 sampler and I believe they also had a Yamaha FSR1.
I made this post to try to find out how the artists did it, and also how I could do it myself, so thanks for helping clearing this up