Noah "40" Shebib is Drake's main producer/engineer, he did Successful, The Calm, I'm On One. His style consists of muffled/distorted R&B melodies over either heavily distorted 808 drums or extremely crisp drums.

Here are three examples of his work:

Drake - The Calm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON10_AfSjX0

Drake - Free Spirit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhlNG5qJy8I

Drake - Marvin's Room
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwyjxsOYnys

My question is what What VSTs or techniques does he use and how does he do it?

I'm thinking high pass filter at around 800hz
Heavy Reverb
maybe a slight guitar amp distortion

what are your thoughts?

thanks in advance

 

sounds like Burial. These people are imitators and this production is not good - check the original style - this is pop crap.

 

Noah been doing this before he gets his 60s of fame so don't be too prompt at judging before you even know the guys and his work.
Btw the point is "how to do it" and not "don't do it". It may surprise you but some people like "this pop crap" lol

 

Anyone who can't appreciate "The Calm" doesnt believe in innovation, and probably has generic mixes.

any ideas on how he does it?
maybe a delay on the kicks?

 

For Synth, He uses Xpand 2 in Pro Tools exclusively. Google it..

For drums lots of filters, this is obvious..

 

Does anyone know how he achieves this? He says he doesn't use a low pass filter he degrades the sample rate. Im guessing he does a combo of both. Sample rate reduction and filtering. But maybe he is removing fundimentals?

 

Ironically, its been like what 4 years since I made this thread? and I've really gotten the hang of this sound.

its all about the anti-aliasing filter, essentially, a low-pass before the SR reduction, the frequency of which is half the chosen sample rate.

When reducing sample rate, anything above the nyquist frequency of that sample rate, gets folded over like a book and makes that digital bird chirp sound. So before you reduce you want to filter that out.

The difference between this and using a filter is that SR reduction doesn't create resonances in the traditional way, its a much more content dependent then just a ringing around the cutoff frequency.

 

Last edited: Mar 21, 2016

I appreciate this very much. Thank You!

 

Sounds like a mix of down-sampling, flutter, wow, saturation and lowpass. I like the FFT smearing in the first one. I find the "bad mp3 codec ringing" actually pretty pleasing (although tamed with some high roll-off).
Having listening to (and emulating) Boards of Canada while growing up this gives me flashbacks.

Check out the free DtBlkFx VST for FFT smearing. Also try very fast SnH (sample and hold) LFO on pitch in a sampler, for that fast grainy flutter.

 

Last edited: Mar 21, 2016

WOW!!

What plugin or daw dependent device would you suggest to use for this technique??

 

Most of their lo-fi sounds are downsampled via avid lo-fi. He likes altiverb and d-verb, but the specific techniques are not disclosed.

 

Cool stuff!

 

I remember reading that he uses Decimort for the sample rate reduction thing. I like to use a similar technique in Toneboosters Bitjuggler.

And there is the free Origin plugin by Cymatics, which has a sample rate reducer inspired by Decimort and Noah's technique. It's a decent lo-fizer, eventhough it can't compete with something like XLN RC-20

From the description of Cymatics Origin:

How does the Resampler engine work?
The core of Origin is its resampler, which changes the sample rate of your running audio in real-time. However, reducing the sample rate alone will produce bitcrusher-style artifacts called “images.” In many cases, these aren’t desirable. Removing these images using Origin’s special filters results in an effect similar to a brick-wall lowpass filter, but with an altogether different sonic character.

Rather than turning down the cutoff on a lowpass filter to cut high frequencies, Origin mathematically forbids high frequencies from existing above the resampler cutoff frequency.

*This effect is the famous “underwater” effect you hear on a lot of melodies in Drake songs.

 

downloaded the cymatics origin. I really liked the plugin.
Theres no output knob for gain staging and no 'undo/redo' buttons. Still pretty cool for a freebie.
thanks for the tip!