When stumbling upon Khal’s post on new bits about the forthcoming C4C LP, I was totally excited and checked their Myspace page. I’ve been totally down with their earlier tracks (Soul, Sarin, ..), which at least for me, set the definitive level of funkiness in DnB tunes. To be honest, I didn’t really feel the tracks they put out after Timestopper though.

Listening to Pandemic, Never Acid Again, Motion Sikness and Control Freak, maybe they should’ve stayed with Acid. Yawn. The beats all sound the same in a over-straight way, nothing surprising anywhere, some standard elements to make the crowd scream, and worst of all: There’s a lot of sample in it I swear I’ve heard again. Maybe just preset sounds or the usual sample CDs, maybe something else.

Disappointing, but not surprising when looking at the rest of the previously-famous British DnB producers. I’m glad there’s a bunch of new ones, because otherwise I would’ve guessed a v!rus had inphected all of them.

Rolling Stone magazine has written down five theories on how the music industry may look like in the future.

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One basic principle of music is that a track’s style can be located on a gradual axis between aggressiveness and funkiness. This is in no way correlated with the concept of a tune’s hardness, but instead caused by the way the defining peaks are arranged within the basic measure grid.

Drum’n'bass tracks, being defined by those very two eponymous elements, are (for the very most part) arranged either along the beats or a bassline, which spans the grid for all other elements of a tune. Mostly, it is the drums, which are set in a repeating 1- or 2-bar pattern. The bassline accompanies this setup like a flow of water streaming within (and by that shaping) the riverbed. (Please note that there several tracks which arrange heavily-broke beats along a straight bassline.) Both elements (drums / bass) can be arranged along the aggressive/funky axis, maximizing the effect in superposition.
Aggressive tracks seem to be fixed around the 1 in each track, focussing all possible energy on few very evenly-distributed spots in that grid. This becomes even more obvious when not only the drums are aligned in this way, but also the bass, which can be found in most Amen-style tunes and unfortunately also in most of Ed Rush’s and Optical recent tunes (who used to deliver more funky tunes in the past). One typical element of this are long-running bass notes. While this is not only easy to apply but also guarantees a certain effect on the floor, it quickly can become boring, because the resulting tunes are very alike in terms of funkiness in that there is little or none.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are the tunes which not only using an more distributed pattern of drum arrangement, but also incorporate increasingly more staccato/dotted notes. The result is that the energy is more widely aligned within a typical 1- or 2-bar pattern. Of course, there still has to be a certain of focus on a few kick, snare and bass hits, but there also is a lot of air in between to let the track virtually breathe. Most prominent examples of pure funk are Cause4Concern’s Sarin and Shiver, but also Phace’s earlier tracks.

Delivering the funk is somewhat more complicated in terms of production than just being aggressive, because the basic grid is not already pre-defined and can be structured at the producer’s will (and the crowd’s delight). There are, however, certain basic production patterns which can guide the way to a funky tune:

1. The Phace shuffle – This term was coined by Basswerk’s The Green Man to describe a 2-bar drum pattern, both of which are standard DnB boom-tschack, but the 1-kick of the second bar is shifted back one eighth, creating a rolling flow.
2. Once you’ve got the basic elements running, arrange certain primary or addivitve elements on odd-numbered 16th, most effective on the very last 16th of a bar. This defocusses energy from the usual centers and is a further development of another pattern, which puts an element on the the 3rd 4th in a bar. Regarding both approaches, instead of putting something, you can also put a space to that spot in the grid, like in the funky Beckoning track by Konflict.
3. Make your tune sound organically by using a different loudness/velocity whenever two successive hits of the same type are close, like two hihat hits or a double-kick hit.
4. For the bassline, arrange its onset spots in the grid in such a way that it uses 8th or 16th which are not already covered by a kick or snare. By that, you not only widely distribute energy and therefore funk, but also allow for maximizing volume in the mastering process of that tune.
5. Play around with the sequencer’s Shuffle function, which can lead to the described patterns in a novel way.

Get funky!

Technorati Tags: funk, drums, bass, energy, measure, production

Sad, but true.

Dom & Roland on DOA:

“They still exist! They just aren’t putting out records anymore…but their entire back catalogue (1600 tunes) are now in some sort of itunes stasis ready to be put up as drm free downloads when apple can be bothered to sort it out!!”

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Danish documentary “good copy, bad copy” interviews several players from the music business (DangerMouse, BBC Archive, Larry Lessig, IFPI, …), thereby creating a nice portrait of the copyright topic as of today.

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A new way of controlling DAWs. Nice!

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