How to make things dirty and thick

Red_Orb

New member
I've been bumping loads of Madlib this week and the one thing that gets me with his beats is how dirty the basses and drums sound. For example, if you listen to the beat for "Auditorium" by Mos Def. You'll get what I mean. I know these are samples and he works completely out the box recording everything on tape... I ain't got that kinda hollywood budget so I need to know if I can achieve a decent emulation of this sound using what I have in the box.
 
You could use a specific plugin like CamelPhat or something similar. I'm sure everyone has their favorite, this one just happens to be free. There are tons of dope ones out there that do different types of distortions very well, so it's worth investing a few hours checking them out.

When I think "dirty and thick" I think that usually someone is using serial distortion and some neat eq techniques. This can also be achieved by layering your drum sounds, which creates dynamics and punch and depending on the samples you choose, some grit. An electronic drum sound combined with a sampled acoustic drum sound is a common technique that works really well.
 
Poop tons of compression, and sometimes probably just 2-tracked from a sp303 without proper mixing in some cases.
I think Madviilliany was mostly sp303>cassette tape.
The heavy compression was likely the vinyl sim effect on the sp303, and then some additional eq, and compression done at the mastering stage.
Pretty sure madlib cut the mixing engineers out of the process on many albums.

You can get similar sounds in the computer, but I'll admit emulating the mpc sound is far easier that the Boss/Roland sp line.
Just DL a ton of free lo-fi, tape emulation, and compressor plugins.
Nebula free, Ferric TDS, Wow&flutter, Time machine, Blockfish compressor, Boogex, Rough rider compressor, and density 3 are all a good start. I could go on. This is one area when DL'ing a ton of vst's isn't a bad idea. You literally need to just mess with all these plugs, and see what works for U.
Nebula is lush BTW, and seems to make all your other plugins sound better, but uses a lot of cpu. Put it on the master channel.
 
Try using a bit crusher to get the lo-fi sound. Instead of sampling at 24 or 16 bit, decrease it down to 12 bit and you'll get that classic little hiss and punch of the early 1990 samplers. If you want the low end, just filter your sample on another track and eq as appropriate. Use tons of compression if you want it dirty as well.
 
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