How to Make Vaporwave Drums That Sound Like a Worn VHS Tape (6 Tips)

How to make vaporwave drums in Ableton is less about programming a kit and more about slowing a beat until it sounds like a memory. Most vaporwave drums aren't programmed at all. The genre grew out of slowed-down, chopped and looped recordings of 80s and 90s pop, smooth jazz and R&B, so the groove you hear is usually somebody else's drum machine, stretched, darkened and soaked in reverb. You're not building a tight backbeat. You're building something that already sounds like an old cassette before you've touched it.

This tutorial shows you how to do that in Ableton Live: build your own 80s-style drum loop at 100 BPM, slow it the vaporwave way with Re-Pitch so speed and pitch drop together (we take it down to 75 BPM), then add tape wobble, VHS and cassette damage, a lower sample rate and a long mallsoft reverb. By the end, a dry two-bar loop should sound like a pulse coming from the next room.

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Where do vaporwave drums come from, and what are we building?

So vaporwave kicked off online in the early 2010s. Daniel Lopatin put out Eccojams as Chuck Person in 2010, where he’d grab a bit of a song, slow it down, loop it and drown it in echo, and he’s said you didn’t need any tech skills to do it. James Ferraro dropped Far Side Virtual in 2011, and that same year Macintosh Plus released Floral Shoppe, the record most people point to as the blueprint: smooth soul and adult contemporary, slowed, chopped, looped and soaked in reverb. On its most famous track she pulls the sample down to about three-quarters speed (roughly a fourth lower), then drops it to half speed later on. Everyone after that branched off. Blank Banshee brought in trap drums in 2012, Luxury Elite slowed 80s pop and jazz until it sounded like late-night TV taped off an old set, and mallsoft folks like Disconscious, Hantasi and Cat System Corp leaned into the lounge vibe of huge empty malls. The drums nearly always come from the original record slowed down, or from a plain loop you make to sound like it did. We’re doing all of this in Ableton with stock stuff you already have: Drum Rack and Simpler with an 80s kit (707 Core Kit works) for the loop, Re-Pitch warping for the slowdown, Chorus-Ensemble in Vibrato for tape wobble, Saturator, EQ Eight, Vinyl Distortion and Erosion to wreck it like an old cassette, Redux for a lo-fi sample rate, Hybrid Reverb for the mall, and Glue Compressor to hold it together

Our working numbers: we build the loop at 100 BPM and slow it to 75 BPM. Slowing to 75% drops everything by about 4.98 semitones, which is within 2 cents of a perfect fourth. That's the same kind of move the early records made, and it's easy to hear.

Tip 1.  Build your own loop to slow down?

Every part of this loop is built for what happens after you slow it down. The closed hat sticks to straight 8ths, because 16ths smear into a hiss once you stretch them, and 8ths at 75 BPM still tick along like a clock in an empty food court. The kick hits 1 and 3 like any slow jam and leaves plenty of space, so the mall reverb we add later has somewhere to go. Its pickups move around between bars (the “a” of 3 in bar 1, the “e” of 4 in bar 2), which keeps a two-bar loop from sounding like a two-bar loop when you play it for ten minutes, and that matters in a genre built on repetition. The snare takes 2 and 4 with an extra hit on the “a” of 2, a little R&B skip that turns into a sleepy stumble once you pitch it down. The rimshot on the “&” of 1 and the open hat on the “a” of 3 are small 80s production touches, the kind of detail a session drummer would program on a 1986 B-side, and slowing them down makes them sound like a memory of that record. The TR-707 sells it, since it was all over mid-80s pop and R&B, and its thin, clean samples already sound like they came off an old cassette before you start wrecking anything.

Here is the loop I make. It's a slow-jam skeleton at 100 BPM, two bars long. 

To set it up, load the 707 Core Kit (or any sampled kit) into a Drum Rack on a MIDI track and draw the two bars. Give the whole kit some normal 80s polish so it sounds like a finished production: Glue Compressor at 2:1, 30 ms attack, auto release and about 2 dB of gain reduction. Then put a short Reverb on the snare chain. Its 1.20-second decay is exactly a half note at 100 BPM, so the dark, slightly chorused tail (cut at 830 Hz and 5.85 kHz, 40% wet) rings for two beats and is gone when the next snare hits.

Now print it, in two parts so the kick stays separate. Duplicate the drum track, mute the kick in one copy and leave only the kick playing in the other. Right-click each track, hit Freeze Track, then Flatten, and Live turns both into audio clips. Group the two tracks and call the group Drums. That’s your record now, the fake 80s single you’ll slow down and wreck, with the kick on one track and everything else on the other. If you’d rather keep the MIDI version around, resample to new audio tracks instead.

Tip 2. How do you slow a drum loop the vaporwave way?

Now slow it down so the speed and pitch drop together. That combo does most of the work: the loop gets lower, longer and a little seasick all at once. In Ableton you get it with Re-Pitch warp mode, which changes how fast the sample plays back, the way a turntable or an old sampler would. Slow it and the pitch sinks, speed it up and the pitch climbs, and double the speed and you’re up a whole octave.

Select both flattened clips, turn Warp on and set Warp Mode to Re-Pitch. Set each clip’s Seg. BPM to 100, the tempo you built it at, so Live lines them up with the grid and the kick stays locked to the rest of the kit. Drop the song tempo to 75. Your loop now plays at 75% speed and about 5 semitones lower. Too much? Try 80 or 85. Not woozy enough? Take it down to 70.

Tip 3. How do you add tape wobble to a drum loop?

Add a small, slow pitch drift, and put it only where you can hear it. Tape wobble (wow and flutter, if you want the technical names) is pitch that drifts a few cents up and down. On short drum hits you barely notice it, so the wobble works best on sustained parts like the cymbal wash and the reverb tail, which is also where it sounds most like a worn cassette. Live gives you three ways to do it, and you can combine them.

Method	Settings	Notes
Chorus-Ensemble, Vibrato mode	Rate as slow as feels natural (start around 0.3–1 Hz), Amount moderate, Offset about 90–180°	Vibrato modulates pitch without layering a delayed copy, so it stays one loop. We put it on the snare and open hat chains inside the Drum Rack.
Echo, Wobble on	On a return, Dry/Wet 100%, Wobble on with Amount about 20–40%	Adds irregular modulation to the delay time to mimic tape delays, so it colors the echoes rather than the dry loop.
Tempo automation	Master tempo drifting between 74.5 and 75.5 BPM over 8–16 bars	Moves a Re-Pitch clip's speed and pitch together, like a real transport. About ±11.5 cents.

We put Chorus-Ensemble in Vibrato mode on the snare chain (the one with the reverb) and the open hat chain, before printing, so the wobble gets slowed down with everything else. If you’ve already printed, add it to those chains and print again. Classic and Ensemble would thicken the drums, but Vibrato bends the pitch a little, so the snare’s reverb tail and the open hat’s wash sway back and forth like a tape that’s been left in a hot car. That drift is a big chunk of the vaporwave feel.

Set Rate as slow as you can get away with, somewhere around 0.3 to 1 Hz. I used 0.90 Hz, which drops to about 0.68 Hz once the loop is slowed to 75%. Amount sits at 60% here. Push it much further and the wobble turns into a warble. Put Offset between 90° and 180°, with 120° as a good middle, so the left and right sides drift apart and the wobble spreads out in stereo. Leave Feedback at 0% so it doesn’t pile up on itself, and push Dry/Wet to 100% so the whole hit moves with it, instead of leaving a clean copy sitting next to the wobbly one.

Keep the amounts small. A wobble you can point to is a wobble that’s too big.

Tip 4. How do you add VHS and cassette damage?

Here’s the damage stack, four quiet layers on the no-kick track so your low end stays clean, with none of them jumping out on its own. Saturator goes first in Soft Sine, with Drive at 4 dB, Dry/Wet at 70% and the Output pulled down to −6 dB, so you get warmth and a little compression without extra volume or real distortion. EQ Eight comes next, with a high-pass around 100 Hz and a low-pass around 10 kHz, so the top and bottom fall away like they would on tape or a cheap speaker. Vinyl Distortion adds a hint of grit with the Tracing Model Drive at 0.20 at 2.50 kHz, Pinch on with its Drive at zero and Crackle off, and Erosion closes the chain in Noise mode at about 20% around 4 kHz with a thin digital hiss, until the loop sounds like a cassette someone found in a drawer after twenty years.

Tip 5. How do you lower the sample rate without wrecking the loop?

Put Redux on a return with Dry/Wet at 100%, send the Drums group to it at 100%, and blend the return down to taste. Ours ended at −8 dB, so the crush sits under the clean drums instead of replacing them. Rate is at 7.50 kHz and Bits at 8, darker and crunchier than a gentle starting point, so you get that thin, slightly metallic early-digital sound plus the odd, out-of-tune overtones that show up when Rate gets this low. Jitter at 20% adds a little noise and width, Shape stays at 0%, and the Pre and Post filters are off, so nothing trims the signal before or after the downsample. Since Redux itself is fully wet, you do all the blending on the return fader.

Tip 6. How do you build a mallsoft room for your drums?

Send the drums to a long, dark, mostly wet reverb, and make it louder than you think is polite, since mallsoft leans into vaporwave’s lounge side and a big room is how you get that empty, echoing space. Make a return called Mall and load Hybrid Reverb’s Small Dark Room (convolution IRs on Early Reflections and Small Ambience, Blend at 100/0 so it’s all convolution). Set Decay to 5.00 seconds, Size to 100%, Attack to 29.7 ms and Predelay to 30 ms so the hit lands before the room, then set Vintage to Older, Stereo to 100% and Bass to Mono, and keep the return 100% wet. Send only the no-kick track and blend the return down to −12 dB, so the drums feel less like a groove and more like a pulse coming from the next room. The snare reverb you printed in Tip 1 also got stretched by the slowdown, from 1.2 to 1.6 seconds, so the Mall sits on top of a room that’s already slow, and that’s a big part of why these records sound like they’re playing somewhere you can’t see the end of. If it gets too washy, shorten the Decay or send less instead of turning the loop down.

 

And that’s it. We started with a clean, polite little 707 loop that could’ve come off any mid-80s R&B single, and we turned it into something that sounds like it’s been playing on repeat in an empty mall since 1993. We slowed it down so the pitch sank with it, made the snare and open hat sway like stretched tape, and roughed up the whole kit until it sounded like a cassette pulled out of a drawer. Nothing in the pattern changed, only what happened to it. Here’s where we started:

And here’s where we ended up: the same two bars, now slow, woozy and worn out, like a song you half remember from a store that closed years ago.

FAQ: vaporwave drums

How do you make vaporwave drums in Ableton?

Program a simple 80s or 90s style loop at about 100 BPM using a sampled kit, print it to audio, and slow it in Ableton's Re-Pitch warp mode to about 75 BPM so pitch and speed drop together. Then add tape wobble with Chorus-Ensemble in Vibrato mode, cassette damage, a lower sample rate from Redux on a return, and a long mall reverb on everything except the kick.

Do vaporwave tracks have drums?

Many classic ones use the drums from the record they slowed, rather than drums programmed from scratch, and some tracks, especially mallsoft and ambient ones, have almost no beat at all. Others, like the trap-influenced branch, use programmed drums. So the answer depends on the subgenre.

What BPM is vaporwave?

There isn't a single tempo, because the tempo comes from the original record and how far you slow it. Slowing a 100 BPM loop to 75 BPM is a typical kind of move, and slowed tracks often land somewhere between about 60 and 90 BPM. That's a working range, not measured data.

How do you slow down a drum loop without changing the pitch?

Use Ableton's Complex or Complex Pro warp mode instead of Re-Pitch, which time-stretches the loop and keeps the original pitch (Complex Pro has a Formants control that is useful when you do transpose). For a classic vaporwave sound, though, you usually want the pitch to fall with the speed, so Re-Pitch is the better choice.

How do you make a drum loop sound like a cassette?

Put a Saturator in Soft Sine on the drums (Drive around 4 dB, Dry/Wet around 70%), then an EQ Eight high-pass around 100 Hz and low-pass around 10 kHz on everything except the kick. Add Vinyl Distortion with Tracing Drive very low (about 0.20) and Crackle kept quiet, and finish with Erosion in Noise mode at about 20% around 4 kHz. Keep each layer small so they add up to a cassette sitting in a drawer.

What reverb do you use for mallsoft drums?

A long, dark room on a return. In Ableton, we used Hybrid Reverb's Small Dark Room preset (convolution IRs on Early Reflections and Small Ambience, Blend at 100/0), with Decay at 5 seconds, Size at 100%, about 30 ms of predelay, Vintage set to Older, and the return 100% wet. Send everything except the kick and blend the return around −12 dB.

Which drum sounds work best for vaporwave?

Short, plain sounds from sampled 80s and early 90s style kits, because they stretch cleanly when slowed. Ableton's 707 Core Kit is a good stock starting point. Avoid very long tails and busy sixteenth-note hats, which turn to mush at slow speeds.

 

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