Watched a tutorial on writing chords for lofi hiphop without samples. I thought about looking into samples but this felt more in line with the stuff I’ve been playing around with, and working with samples is something I haven’t tried yet in Ableton.

I agree with the top YouTube comment: this guy is both awesome and sucks at the same time. He’s an asshole but also teaches the content well.

I was browsing some other YouTube videos and found some resources.

Noting this down for later: https://www.reddit.com/r/thelofidistrict/comments/dvy50u/online_resources_for_lofi_production_v4/

And I grabbed some drums from here. I followed the tutorial video for the piano chords (didn’t come up with these myself), and then just stacked some drums on top. I deliberately didn’t quantize the percussion, because lofi seems to benefit from having notes played slightly imperfectly rather than robotically on-beat (whereas electronic music definitely needs things perfectly on-beat).

I think there’s something in the approach that can be applied to future loops. Specifically, playing out each of the triads for a given scale half step by half step, and then selecting certain triads to use as chord progressions. For instance, this one was ‘2, 5, 1’ and future ones I could play around with different minor/major scales and different triads among the 8 available.