What is Lo-Fi?

[imdrecordings]

Lo-Fi to me equals awesome music, songwriting and performance that was captured quickly and candidly out desperation, but with total disregard or lack of the tools and equipment used on expensive recordings.
In other words... Art of the streets and soul.
A balance between emotion meets expression and fidelity meets patients.

[themagicmanmdt]

does that make van gogh a lo-fi artist?



sometimes smearing the landscape creates it's own new art, and accomplishes something that no crystal clean mic and preamp can.

there's places for rembrandts (jeff lynne, nigel godrich) and there's places for pollacks (phil elverum and elephant 6).



fidelity is a tool, not a necessity. use it when it's called for, and vice versa.

[mfdu]

Lo-Fi (Low Fidelity): disregarding and often flagrantly violating the established conventions of sound-quality, Lo-Fi often sounds unclean, containing natural noises such as natural reverb and echoes, distortion, tape-hiss and/or feedback, and various sonic artifacts, lack of sound-picture clarity, and the use of noise as an instrument.

i read this with trepidation, because i would say that my base ethic is one of lo-fi.

eg. i have not used phantom power fr about two years now. it came about when i finally acknowledged that dynamics and ribbons exhibit better rejection, and has become a bt of a 'stance'
that said, i also have a tin roof. so while the double-glazing may stop a fair bit of noise, there is always something bleeding through. condensors are just too unforgiving and sensitive.and i build my own gear. everything has little fauts and glitches, but they all sound 'great'

i believe the lo-fi ethic follows a bit of the roots revival.
My Bloody Valentine are definately not following the ethic. Black Keys, John SPenser Blues Explosion. how about The Birthday Party? Beasts of Bourbon?
Bob Log III ???? now there's a real man.

but seriously, i have rules for my clients.
stuff like a three-take maximum - if they can't get it in three takes, it's off to another piece, and we'll return to the harder one later.
and "the band that rehearses together, records together" - that's pretty clear, huh?

maybe that's more 'work ethic' stuff, but for me it's tied in with the type of sound i pull. and if you don't want my type of sound? go somewhere that sounds like everybody else!!!


chris

[joel hamilton]

Being able to do what is best for any given session has been my goal since the beginning of my recording-other-people life.

deciding the best presentation for a given song, and the best way to get to that presentation... that is the part of recording that requires talent. A monkey can turn knobs.

[mfdu]

absolutely. but i'm such a small fish that folks can come to me for a particular sound.
not that i can't do a wide range of work, but i'm just not interested in comping hip-hop from 23 milliion takes!!!
if they don't like the vibe / ethic behind my joint, then make your choice by going somewhere else instead and let me focus on what i do best.

(in this day and age, it doesn't hurt a little fella to be true to an ethic - calling lo-fi an ethic at this point - let the big studios cover everything else. and if i sound the same as every protools based project studio, how will people know i'm the one for them? i.e. keep your bright microphones and your shiny plugins, and i'll pursue my own little world of THD)

chris

[kdarr]

Most of my favorite hip-hop records are pretty low-fidelity.

Return to the 36 Chambers comes to mind.

I miss that grimy mid-90's NYC sound, where things are sampled off actual records on ASR10's.

I agree with most of the previous posts, but I also feel like "lo-fi" is just another easy music-critic pigeonhole term. Another marketing buzzword.

And then there's that whole Strokes thing where you spend a jillion dollars trying to make it sound like you recorded it on a 4-track in your basement. What should we call that? Faux-fi?

[<|>]

[leigh]

i'd say that 'lo-fi' means anything that is below the standards for the highest quality audio given the time period it was made. this would mean that very old recordings aren't lo-fi simply because they have more hiss/noise than new ones...

hence, iTunes = lo-fi

[roygbiv]

kdarr wrote:

.....spend a jillion dollars trying to make it sound like you recorded it on a 4-track in your basement. What should we call that? Faux-fi?

dude - I love that! Faux-fi. That should an insult. OK, first an insult, then a compliment, then after a couple of weeks when some hip blogger uses it to describe a movement, somebody will use it for an album title. Probably Beck.

[RefD]

kdarr wrote:

.....spend a jillion dollars trying to make it sound like you recorded it on a 4-track in your basement. What should we call that? Faux-fi?

dude - I love that! Faux-fi. That should an insult. OK, first an insult, then a compliment, then after a couple of weeks when some hip blogger uses it to describe a movement, somebody will use it for an album title. Probably Beck.

it'll be his disco-folk-rock opera about how he thinks Dianetics is so awesome and he wants to have a million of L. Ron Hubbard's babies on toast.

[JGriffin]

* Adds "faux-fi" to Donny Who Loved Bowling marketing material *

[RefD]

* Adds "faux-fi" to Donny Who Loved Bowling marketing material *

*pre-orders next album based on this*

[sears]

A monkey can turn knobs.

And that's what lo-fi is.

[thieves]

i'd say that 'lo-fi' means anything that is below the standards for the highest quality audio given the time period it was made. this would mean that very old recordings aren't lo-fi simply because they have more hiss/noise than new ones...

hence, iTunes = lo-fi

i said 'standards'

[leigh]

i'd say that 'lo-fi' means anything that is below the standards for the highest quality audio given the time period it was made. this would mean that very old recordings aren't lo-fi simply because they have more hiss/noise than new ones...

hence, iTunes = lo-fi

i said 'standards'

Don't know exactly what you mean, or if you're just joking, but I am serious.

A jazz '78 from the twenties has a measurably more limited bandwidth, and more noise, than an MP3 from iTunes. However, while that jazz '78 was the best they could do at the time, iTunes as a distribution channel is decidedly and intentionally lo-fi, in that it is a downgraded copy of the 44.1/16 digital master.

Sorry if I'm just preaching to the choir here...

Leigh

[thieves]

yeah but most people accept mp3 quality as the status quo