The History of Slowed + Reverb Music
Slowed + reverb music - the art of slowing down a song’s tempo and reducing it's pitch, and finally bathing it in a hall reverb.
The Godfather of Slowed + Reverb
The history of this production technique originates in early 1990s in a small apartment on the Southside of Houston, Texas. It all started with a 19 year old boy named Robert Earl Davis Jr., who went by the name DJ Screw.
DJ Screw was not a club DJ. He would occasionally spin his records house parties, community halls, and small neighbourhood events. Most of his time was spent in his Home Studio, which he called The Wood Room.
Equipment
Like most DJs from the 1970s through to the early 1990s, he used a vinyl Technics SL-1200 direct-drive turntable. This specific turn table was considered the gold stand for DJs. It's worth noting that CD turntables did not emerge until the mid 90s - and far in the future came the USB turntables you see DJs use today.
🖼️ Picture of Technics SL-1200
What makes this turntable so important? It's the slider on the right hand side. That slider controls the Speed of the vinyl record. Although it's labeled as "Pitch", it actually slows down the vinyl record itself, causing the read head to interpret the sound with a slower tempo and a lower pitch (The term speed is often confused with tempo. Speed is the combination of the tempo and pitch).
How it worked in practice:
- Load the same vinyl onto both Technics SL-1200 turntables.
- Match the slowdown by using the pitch control sliders to bring both records to the same desired, slowed-down tempo.
- Set the crossfader to Deck A - set it such that the audience can only hear Deck A. He often used a "hamster-style" crossfader.
- Start the records - start playing both Decks at the same point of the song. This can be the start of the song or a specific point if you can find the same exact moment on both records.
- Hold one record - on Deck B, hold Record B with your hand while using a slipmat. The slipmat will allow you to hold the record still while the turntable driver beneath can continue spinning. This is known as slip-cueing. This will be the point in the song we return to after we chop.
- Wait to chop Deck A - while Record A plays and the moment has arrived to chop it, snap the crossfader from Deck A to Deck B and at the same time let go of Record B. Record B will now be playing, which takes us back to a moment a bit earlier in the song.
- Prepare by Slip-cueing Deck A - now that the chop is complete, we spin-back Deck A (which is muted) to the earlier chop point and repeat the process going the other way.
- Add warble - he would drag his finger along the side of the wheel so that it created a warble effect.
- Record the entire session live straight to a Maxell 100-minute cassette using a Tascam.
- Run the cassette through a four-track recorder and use its pitch control to slow the mix even further, adding extra depth and warmth.
The slipmat isn't necessary if you simply have one deck playing the song a bit behind the other deck, and then crossfade to the other.
Back in 1986 DJ Quest bought his first mixer and when he connected his turntables - he accidentally plugged the left turntable into right channel and the right turntable into the left channel - which made his fader work in “reverse” when opening and closing the fader. This is a hamster-style crossfader.
This technique came to be known as "chopped and screwed".
He "chopped" by quickly crossfading between copies of the same record, creating stutters or repeats on beat. By slowing the records to -8% speed, he dropped songs into that low BPM sweet spot.
Cultural Influence
At the same time during the early 90s, there was a car gathering culture in Houston. Custom cars known as "Slabs" (often older Cadillacs, Buicks, or Lincolns), would play DJ Screw's music in marking lots, gas stations, and neighbour streets. As you might have guessed, these cars carried large subwoofers and candy paint jobs which change colour under street light changes.
This street-level exposure was one of the ways his sound spread without radio play. If you were in Houston, you could literally hear Screw’s influence rolling past you at night as his tapes were distributed.
The city affectionately earned the nickname 'Screwston'.
The slowed, heavy bass of Screw’s mixes became the ideal soundtrack for this scene. Sipping on "lean" (codeine cough syrup mixed with soda), a sedative concoction that slows the senses, became associated with the movement.
🖼️ Picture of a DJ Screw Tape
If you were an MC and wanted Screw to make you a mixtape with you, you would come to his home studio and hit record. Screw sometimes literally selling tapes through the bars of his front door to eager drivers outside.
DJ Screw's collective of MCs, DJs and friends would create music together in this studio. One such session is DJ Screw - June 27.
🎧 Listen to DJ Screw - June 27
Tragically, DJ Screw’s meteoric run was cut short. In November 2000, at just 29 years old, Screw died from a codeine overdose.
Early 2000s: Spreading Influence & Ron C
Associates of Screw such as UGK, Z-Ro, Paul Wall, and Chamillionaire proudly incorporated the slowed aesthetic into their music, either by referencing it or releasing "chopped & screwed" remix albums.
In 2000, the Memphis rap group Three 6 Mafia put out the song "Sippin' on Some Syrup," as a reference to the codeine-laced "sizzurp" drink associated to the Houston’s slow vibe.
By the mid 2000s, major labels were commissioning official chopped-and-screwed versions of popular albums. T-Pain released a radio single titled "Chopped ’n’ Skrewed" in 2008, and artists like Beyoncé to Drake would drop slowed-down remixes or interludes as homages to the Houston sound. Drake's producer 40 would often produce music with slowed down second halves of songs.
🎧 Listen to Drake - November 18th
Ron C and The Chopstars
In 2001, another person from the Northside named Ron C founded The Chopstars, a collective of DJs dedicated to keeping the slowed-down tradition alive, using the tagline "Chopped-Not-Slopped".
Equipment
Around 1998, a new music technology arrived: Pioneer’s CDJ decks and early CD burners. Embracing new tech, Ron C and Watts managed to get one of the first CD burners (which they paid $9,000 USD for) to distribute mixes on CD, giving them a leg up in sound quality and reach. The Pioneer CDJ-100S was a game changer: it wasn’t just playing CDs, the speed slider on the right side allows for -24% slowdown.
🖼️ Picture of Pioneer's CDJ-100S
By the early 2000s, computer-based recording entered the picture. Ron C recounts moving from the old Tascam tape recorder to a Roland digital workstation, and then to a PC using multi-track software (Cakewalk, then Pro Tools) by the early 2000s.
🖼️ Screenshot of Cakewalk DAW
Knowing where to cut, "chopping up the record and not the words," as Ron C puts it, was a subtle art that separated the pros from amateurs. If you go to YouTube and read the comments of chopped not slopped videos, fans of the genre will tell you how important it is to get this right.
2010s: The Digital Age, New Genres, and Niche Experiments
The age of DAWs and internet distribution had begun. With this, the practice of slowing tracks began to be used in underground internet genres and experimental scenes, often combined with heavy reverb and other effects.
Two notable microgenres similar to chopped & screwed were vaporwave and witch house, both emerging in the early-to-mid 2010s.The analog era had come to it's end.
Vaporwave, an internet-born genre, explicitly embraced the technique of slowing down sample-based music. Producers would take snippets of 1980s pop, smooth jazz, or elevator music and slow them dramatically, often adding echoey reverb to craft a surreal, nostalgic haze.
Vaporwave is defined partly by its slowed-down, chopped and screwed samples. Don't believe it? Listen to the vaporwave classic "リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー" by Macintosh Plus (2011), which is essentially a Diana Ross '80s song slowed and chopped, a formula directly indebted to DJ Screw’s legacy.
🎧 Listen to Macintosh Plus - リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー
The result is more ambient, atmosphere, and nostalgic - a departure from the sound of DJ Screws'.
Around the same time, the dark electronic genre witch house (pioneered by groups like Salem) was likewise applying “chopped and screwed” ideas to goth and industrial-influenced beats.
The difference here being that witch house tracks are heavy in reverb, and feature extremely pitch shifted vocals. Essentially, witch house artists took the spookiest elements of chopped & screwed (the wooziness, the deepened voices) and fused them with haunting synths and occult aesthetics to create an entirely new, if niche, style.
🎧 Listen to Salem - King Night
Meanwhile, within hip-hop and R&B, the chopped/slowed influence continued. Many Southern artists kept releasing chopped & screwed remixes for mixtapes or special editions.
Pop took a different direction. In Pop, YouTubers would slow down songs using an extreme time stretch. One viral example of the 2010s was the ultra-slowed remix of Justin Bieber’s “U Smile” (800% slower) that circulated in 2010. Using a tool called PaulStretch, the creator stretched and reverbed the track into an ethereal cloud of sound. Fun fact, PaulStretch was the inspiration behind SpeedShift Drone Stretch.
🎧 Listen to Justin Bieber - U Smile 800% Slower
The technique of slowing down music continued, but DJ Screw's technique of chopping faded into the realms of music history.
Late 2010s: The YouTube “Slowed + Reverb” Boom and the Slater Era
By the late 2010s, teenagers on laptops were about to take the slowed-remix concept to YouTube with a new name: "slowed + reverb".
In 2017, a YouTube user named Jarylun Moore, aka Slater, uploaded a remix that would inadvertently kick off an entire subgenre.
Slater took the song “20 Min” by Lil Uzi Vert – a moody hip-hop track – and simply slowed it to about 85% of its original tempo and added a dose of digital reverb, then paired it with a looping animation of a pink skeleton.
🎧 Listen to Lil Uzi Vert - 20 Min (slowed + reverb)
Within a week, the video racked up 20,000 views; within two months it had crossed one million.
Suddenly, an army of copycat channels sprang up, all making "Artist - Song Title (slowed + reverb" remixes, following Slater’s simple blueprint.
The fun part of this story? Slater, who was a 20-year-old from Houston, is often credited as the originator of the “slowed + reverb” trend on YouTube. The same age DJ Screw was.
By the late 2010s, hugely popular slowed+reverb edits included everything from Estelle’s bubbly 2008 R&B hit "American Boy" (transformed into a forlorn, dream-like lament in its slowed form) to contemporary hits by artists like Halsey, Juice WRLD, and Tame Impala.
Technically, making a basic slowed+reverb remix was easy. One need only drop an MP3 into software, reduce the speed/tempo by ~15% (which also lowers the pitch a bit, giving those deep vocals), and apply a reverb effect (often a large hall reverb to create that echoey space).
Many YouTubers admitted their process was as simple as it sounds, it could be done in a few minutes using the free software Audacity. Several tutorial videos and guides popped up, encouraging newcomers that they too could make slowed+reverb edits with minimal effort.
Interestingly, Slater himself respected this distinction. Coming from Houston, he was well aware of DJ Screw’s legacy and intentionally avoided calling his work "screwed" music.
In an interview with Pitchfork, he says "... it’s not really screwed if it’s not by Screw. Two, the chops are sacred to the culture, and not everybody can imitate it. So I would never want to even try to. I’m just glad I’m able to bring it to a wider audience."
The community that formed around these YouTube remixes was notably passionate and vulnerable. Listeners gravitated to slowed+reverb as the backdrop for late-night loneliness, heartbreak recovery, or simple chill-out sessions. Comment sections on these videos often became supportive forums where anonymous teens poured out personal stories of lost love or depression, finding comfort in the shared melancholic atmosphere.
2020s: TikTok Revival, Controversy, and the Mainstream Embrace
As the 2020s rolled in, slowed + reverb found yet another life on TikTok. Short-form TikTok videos began using slowed versions of songs to set a mood for everything from nostalgic montages to aesthetic skits. A snippet of a song in slowed+reverb form often went viral as a TikTok sound, prompting thousands of copycat videos and sending viewers searching for the full version on YouTube.
So here we are today. Reels and tiktoks featuring slowed + reverb music.
🎧 Listen to best of Øneheart // ambient mix
Best Slowed + Reverb Audio Plugin
Most slowed + reverb music is produced digitally now, using time stretching in digital audio workstations.
Until recently, it was difficult to know how to create a slowed + reverb song while being in-key and specifying a specific tempo. With SpeedShift by Sottovoce DSP, you can easily create a slowed + reverb song in a variety of DAWs such as Ableton, FL Studio.
🖼️ Screenshot of SpeedShift Speedup
