How can I make my beats sound old sounding/90s grimey sound?

Xabiton said:
just to add to this you can't low pass everything. So much of the sound had to do with the 12 bit samplers of the day. It wasn't that it was really filtered it was just the lower sample rates of the day that added to a more muffled sound and a more distorted sound. While you can come close to this sound using methods like mentioned here nothing matches the machines used themselves. And S900s are dumb cheap these days. The most popuar setup in hip hop until like the late 90s was the sp1200/s950/900 combo as far as I know
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S950 w/RAM expansion+MPC60II w/RAM expansion = GOAT hip hop setup.
 
Im not super impressed by the mpc 60ii I will say if I had one of those I wouldnt have much of a need for the 950. 28 seconds of sample time is more than enough for me
 
Xabiton said:
just to add to this you can't low pass everything. So much of the sound had to do with the 12 bit samplers of the day. It wasn't that it was really filtered it was just the lower sample rates of the day that added to a more muffled sound and a more distorted sound. While you can come close to this sound using methods like mentioned here nothing matches the machines used themselves. And S900s are dumb cheap these days. The most popuar setup in hip hop until like the late 90s was the sp1200/s950/900 combo as far as I know
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I think a lot of the filtering came more from producers and engineers trying to clean up sampling from bad vinyl records.


The Lo Pass filter will get rid of a lot of crackles and is a poor man's noise reduction tool.


I own a S950 and find that is isn't that muffled sounding but it does have a certain grit to it. Some of it can be emulated to a certain degree using plug-ins but it won't be exactly it but I'd expect you could get close enough to fool the average Joe.

The s950 didn't really get that gritty until you started doing intentional low sample rate sampling to conserve memory.
 
I have never thought of Akai samplers as gritty at all. In those days the Akais were always the cleanest sounding machines. If you want grit I still say scoop up some Ensoniq stuff. I felt it sounded better than the Akais anyway
 
This is about the genre, right? Not using "grimy" as an adjective, correct?

If you want that signature grime-oriented wobble bassline, you can just a 3xOsc. Turn the coarse tuning down on all 3 oscillators, use a sine wavelength for the 3xOsc's 1st/primary oscillator, a triangle for the 2nd osc, maybe another triangle (or square?) for the 3rd. Just toy around, really. Throw a flanger on it, do some EQing, maybe add some tape saturation, bam.
 
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