This one was interesting. I tried to do the same chord approach as the first Lofi post I made, where I followed a music-theory-ish tutorial and copied the chords he added. I tried to use the same principles and pick chords whose names I forget… and it just sounded incredibly meh.

I noticed some thoughts come up related to not having any idea of what I’m doing — guess the learnings from the previous tutorial I watched didn’t stick. This is my fear in watching beat-making tutorials — that I won’t learn principles behind the beats that allow me to come up with my own chord progressions, without copying someone else’s steps.

Anyway — I watched another tutorial and started from those chords. It sounded pretty eh, and this tutorial’s quality is definitely lower (although much kinder to his subscribers) than the other guy’s. However I continued to mess around with this and was kind of pleased with what I ended up with. It sounds kind of lo-fi-ish and chill, which is what I was going for, and I didn’t even learn any tricks about getting that classic/clichéd lo-fi sound.

I do want to build the skill of making lofi beats, and I’d like to be able to make a clichéd lofi beat in Ableton from scratch (i.e. not leaning on samples). And then after that, same but using samples.

Pretty sure I would hugely benefit from learning and practicing some basic music theory. I found a video that goes through some things (this guy makes a lot of beats so I trust his channel).