I was watching a vid and the guy mention 'a classic house technique' that I never heard of. Basically he says, resample your beats, pitch them lower then use a lot of compression. Afterwards layer it with your beats.

starts at 5:24

ok...

Sure I know NY compression, but this pitch it lower thing is new to me. He doesn't show the details in his vid, just plays the result. He ending with the same tempo beat for his new layer. Thinking in terms of hardware (old school 90s, so it likely was) that would probably mean pitching it down and then timestreching it.

I have some hardware and want to recreate this.

So pitching it down say 6 semitones, then applying a timestretch of 70, 71. Math courtesy of https://mp3.deepsound.net/eng/samples_calculs.php.

But then I just have a crunchy sound that destroys my kick when I lay it under. Never mind the headaches created #cause the s2400 doesn't seem to agree completely with the math.

I was just wondering if anybody knows this technique and could throw me some pointers.

 

no its not, he just pulled that from nowhere. classic house trick is reduce frequency, pitch down samples, but layering with original after time stretching Its not

 

You're referring to individual samples being pitched down? This I've heard of. But in his vid he plays the full beat. His kick seems to have lost all it's low end though.

Edit: huh... maybe he pitched down the individual samples and then applied them to his original MIDI to get his new beat. Then did the NY thing. Must have high passed the kick.

 

Last edited: Apr 2, 2026 at 7:08 PM

Today I learned that parallel compression was widely used in NY for the first time, and that gave it the name NY compression.
Thanks guys, I didn't know that :D
About that thing he says he does: I don't think its done in the video, but the Akai Samplers had a pitch shifter with time-compression/expansion.
That very shattery effect often used on drum loops in the 90ies (jungle and d&b used it a lot) all came from akai 2800 to 3200 (unsure, could be that the akai 1000 already had that effect). It was an offline effect. the sampler rendered for several seconds to get the result.
I could imagine that having a loop, copying it, pitching it down a little for getting that shattery effect, high passing it and adding it back to the og loop could make a very interesting sound.
//edit// I used that downpitching a lot back then, I really liked the sound, but I never added it to the og loop, I used it solo.

 

That trick of pitching down and layering a full drum loop can work for adding weight, but you have to be careful with the kick. He doesn’t really show what he did. He’s using chopped Amen break hits and the Lyn Collins “Think” break, so the frequency content can vary a lot depending on the source of the samples.

If you pitch the whole loop, you’re also pitching the kick, which means you’re layering two kicks with different fundamentals. That can cause phase issues and make the low end inconsistent instead of stronger. This is where people end up dragging things into Sonic Academy Kick 2/3 and pulling out Voxengo PHA-979 trying to fix something they accidentally created.

On top of that, stretching/pitching will smear the transient, so the layered kick can actually reduce punch instead of adding it.

A safer approach is to highpass the pitched loop or just remove the kick from it entirely, and keep one clean, controlled kick as your low end.
Otherwise you’re basically sabotaging your own low end. He doesn't seem to mind and he even mentions keeping his kick "thin" on purpose.

Using the lower mids up is the part I’d take from the video, if anything. He’s compressing the two copies together, but it’s not really a parallel/NY setup since he’s not showing a proper pre-fader send. He's just straight layering into a bus, mostly for glue.

 

The classic house technique I strongly suspect he’s referring too (but probably doesn't understand properly - it’s YouTube after all), was to sample a drum loop from 33RPM vinyl at 45RPM.

By increasing the playback speed, it used less memory in the sampler. We would then play the drum loop back 6 semitones lower from the sampler to reproduce the loop at its original tempo.

The change in pitch in the sampler added weight and a crunchy feel to the sound.

 

This is a trick that was used primarily in hiphop to get around the sp1200's very low sample memory.

 

It may have been used in hip hop, but it was used very heavily in the production of house music throughout the early 90s.

 

He's talking about speed garage, and he got the timing of that right showing that Sneaker Pimps record from 1997. By that point, sampler memory was much less of a concern. People still used the S1000, and the Akai MPC60's, but the most commonly used was the MPC 3000 and then the 2000, which both had enough memory to not do stuff like that.

 

The Akai MPC3000 and Akai MPC2000 shipped with 2Mb which was limited in practical use, especially once you’re building full arrangements with multiple programs and longer samples.

You’re also mistaking it as “just” a workaround, it wasn’t. The technique of sampling at a higher playback speed and pitching down persisted throughout the 90s and early 2000s (and is still used today) because of what it does to the sound.

Pitching down changes transient response, adds weight, and introduces a particular grain that became a fundamental part of the aesthetic across house, garage and speed garage.

Memory constraints didn’t disappear, they just eased, and even if they had, that wouldn’t remove a technique that producers were deliberately using for its sonic character.

Sneaker Pimps in 1997 (along with its remixes) sits right in the period where the Akai-based workflow and associated sound were still a very standard practice.