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Edmund Sparkler posted:Dubstep (specifically brostep) was tailor made for insecure young guys who thought that house music was too There's definitely some truth to this. Dubstep was born from UK Garage, but as soon as a bunch of Drum & Bass producers got a hold of it around 2008 it started to lose the shuffle rhythm and develop an aggressive edge. Things started bubbling up in North America where that aggression REALLY started to pick up steam and it quickly led to the explosive popularity of guys like Excision and eventually Skrillex. I don't know if the fact that Skrillex was formerly in a metalcore band had anything to do with the genre's cross-pollination in popularity, but it may have. In any case, the hostility of that particular flavour of Dubstep had an appeal to loads of millenials who were coming into their own musical tastes around 2010 but unsure of the 'Blog House' that came before; four-on-the-floor House rhythms just reminded everyone a bit too much of the Electric Circus, Alice Deejay/Darude/Tiesto 'Techno' they used to make fun of people for being into in the late 90s. Dubstep came along with its halftime rhythm devoid of any real intricacy, something you can bob to if you're into Hip-Hop or just don't really know how to dance. Those kind of beats lend themselves very well to spicy open hi-hats and huge midrange-dominating snares - stuff that tweaked your ear as signatures of metal music - and the pummelling chainsaw synthesizer sounds had a weight to them not unlike that of a down-tuned guitar, chugging along on the tonic note in patterns reminiscent of the nu-metal that so many disaffected young men listened to in their pre-teen years. 'The Drop' had been a thing for some time but a lot of Dubstep artists basically turned that manipulation of building energy into their whole raison d'etre, like they'd cracked part of 'the code' that made music hit your brain's reward system. The fact that popular dance music trended towards the loud in-your-face stuff that we tend to associate with Dubstep (but also Electro House, Hardstyle, Drum & Bass etc.) was sort of inevitable with the advancement of music production technology. Not only did everything become more accessible than ever before with the advent of laptops and powerful self-contained DAWs, but the tools we use to mix music became more surgical. The pioneers of the dark, brooding and aggressive Drum & Bass sound that was a primary progenitor of what we're calling Dubstep here, used to do something called 'resampling': essentially, this is the process of recording a sound through a series of filters and effects, and then taking the result and putting it through the same (or other) filters and effects. It was a necessity because of the limitations of studio equipment in the 1990s - your sampler or your computer would run out of memory and your CPU would choke on big chains of devices with automated parameters, so you'd burn to audio a simple bass sound with some filter movement, and then take that audio and run it through more effects until you got something you liked. It's possible to be clinical with this approach, but by and large it is a process of 'throwing poo poo at the wall until it sticks'; there was little method to it and producers would spend days resampling basslines with basically zero technical education of what their gear is actually doing, until something that sounded new and inspiring came out the other end. A lot of producers still do resample religiously (in fact there are certain timbres that you basically can't get without employing a sampler for its unique properties like time-stretching and granulation), but the advent of powerful software synthesizers like NI Massive (literally the dominating synth in all Dubstep) and DAWs that could run effect chains as long as your computer would allow, made the process of inventing twisty new synth sounds with novel harmonic series that invaded your sinuses while the bass shook your body, very easy and accessible without all that work. Maybe more important than the new synths that came out and rocked the world of EDM production, is compression. We've all heard of the 'loudness wars' that permeated music and caused critics to cry. The thing that's really at the heart of that ability to squeeze every ounce of volume out of a song, is this dynamic range compression and limiting. Compressors have always been a thing in music production, but around 2005 we started seeing digital options that were basically transparent; you could apply boatloads of limiting to a channel (or indeed, your entire mix) without incurring the same colouration and loss of impact that their predecessors would impart to the sound. Similarly, frequency crossovers got really tight and transparent in the past 15 years or so, which let to Over-The-Top compression (a multiband compression technique that compresses all bands of a signal both upwards and downwards at basically an infinite ratio); a development that's become so popular it's a preset in Ableton's native Multiband Compressor and other devices, and something that you basically can't produce a modern EDM song without employing in some way or another. Additionally, sidechain compression (that 'pumping' sound most readily associated with Daft Punk's Discovery even though it's barely used at all on that album, maybe it could more accurately attributed to Justice's debut release Cross) allowed producers to use sounds that were dominating of a wide range of the frequency spectrum without having to complementarily EQ out parts so they didn't clash - just slap a surgical sidechain comp on your screechy midrange wobble to duck it slightly every time your huge snare hits. So yeah, the behemoth that is EDM as we know it was something of an inevitability, born of advancements in technology and accessibility. And its vanguard was Dubstep - a genre that was almost tailor-made to appeal to disaffected millennial boys who were getting bored of Nu-Metal and wanted to wile out on drugs but thought House music was too gay to admit to enjoying. I do find it really hilarious, in a mildly bitter way, that a LOT of the same dudes who used to make fun of me for enjoying the Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk and Mr Oizo, came to me in the early 2010s like reborn electronic music heads. Their enthusiasm for electronic music is nakedly shallow. On the other hand, the genre basically breathed new life into Drum & Bass and probably Electro House too, and the folks who actually legitimately enjoyed it branched out into those genres and started doing some really innovative things. Dubstep is never coming back though. I mean, it never really left, but it's not going to see a resurgence based on a couple of pedestrian tunes on the new Skrillex album - most of which take a turn into four-on-the-floor rhythms anyway, which is a strong indicator that even producers are fatigued by the sound. I mostly stopped paying attention to the aggro Bro Dubstep side of things around 2015. Although there are still the occasional banger that sits around 140BPM halftime and absolutely tears my loving head off - and I will always give a listen to releases from perennial favourites like Excision or Knife Party - since that time they've become exceedingly rare. Most Dubstep producers with more than a modicum of talent moved on to making Trap music in the mid-2010s. Producers who never got out of that sound are now making cookie-cutter 'headbanging' tunes that literally all sound the same, and what's worse is they're calling it 'Riddim' now, which is honestly loving embarrassing. There's still plenty of good 'Deep Dubstep' out there, the kind of stuff that inspires you to roll up a big blunt and chill while still tickling your hypermasculine side with a bit of hostility, but by and large producers making that stuff are generally just calling it 'Grime'. Dubplate Fire posted:Hes doing jungle, like a fuckin adult lmao what track on the new album would you call even remotely 'jungle'? Mister Speaker fucked around with this message at 20:39 on May 9, 2023 |
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May 9, 2023 20:33
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Dubplate Fire posted:I didnt listen to it, i just read a headline in a fb group lol. Nice, thread revival time. Destroid were also something of an inevitability in the EDM scene; a 'band' of masked artists 'making' extremely Bro Dubstep 'live'. I use those quotation marks maybe too derisively, there probably WAS something going on with their custom MIDI guitars, but I think the only one who was really doing much was their drummer, KJ Sawka. Excision and Downlink just kind of looked rad. Anyway they didn't have many hits except for Bounce, which absolutely slaps. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_axRf7gOVds The VIP mix is even better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdUMzmLTolg
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Jun 11, 2023 22:50
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49xH4e4gyUM
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Jun 12, 2023 19:58
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnKvIFOewZQ
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Jun 13, 2023 19:22
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Not quite the right tempo but Truth are legendary in the 'deep but still aggressive' side of dubstep, and one of a few artists who REALLY know how to flex their ultra-low sub bass: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t4VQQ0C-C8
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Jun 13, 2023 19:50
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lNVr2b3XUY
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Jun 22, 2023 00:21
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Zeluth posted:Say no to techno. One of my most abrasive (and probably baseless, admittedly) music opinions is that Techno, like Detroit Techno-rear end Techno, is Bad Music, and anyone who enjoys it is either on too much speed, or they don't actually like electronic music and their enjoyment is performative. It's just so impossibly boring. I realize that it's an incredibly wide and varied genre and there are definitely exceptional tunes that I enjoy (usually ones that make use of rhythmic syncopation) but I cannot understand why people enjoy being pummelled by quarter note kicks soaked in reverb and the VERY occasional lowpassed synth stab. It's also the only genre I've danced to that seems to be rife with DJs who have no respect for musical phrasing. As I grew up playing drums, that kind of stuff is my bread & butter, and hearing DJs not only trainwreck left and right but introduce new songs off-measure (off by an odd number of bars or even BEATS), just drives me crazy. I feel like Techno DJs are mostly just in it for the ego stroking and don't care to hone their craft, but maybe I've just seen some lovely Techno DJs. I don't really go public with this take too often - let people enjoy what they like and that - but privately, for the life of me I cannot see what interests so many people in the genre. Give me actual rhythms, and respect the loving formula.
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Jun 22, 2023 02:49
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Having said that, if I ever come into a bunch of money again the first thing I'm buying is an Erica Synths Techno System. That's (hopefully) the closest I'll ever get to modular; something else that I do not understand or care for much but the System looks and sounds like I could make some dope Dub with it.
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Jun 22, 2023 03:03
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Windows 98 posted:I smoked weed with Kill The Noise. Cool dude. Yeah he seems that way. There are a couple of real gems in the scene, so odd for how bro-ey the music and scene normally are, guys like KTN, Getter and Excision sure do dress like Dubstep DJs but they're actually incredibly talented and introspective and just... Real. I smoked a cigarette with two of the guys from Noisia. I've had beers with Dub Phizix, one of the guys from Loadstar, Bladerunner (after opening for him) and Rene Lavice. I was gonna ask MC Det to get a photo as I opened for him and Brockie on my birthday, but he was a total diva so I didn't approach him. This is a big tangent but it was on my mind today as another banal encounter with a famous musician: I almost stepped on Kardinal Offishall's shoes at a Sister Nancy concert.
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Jun 22, 2023 03:22
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Wrageowrapper posted:If you go with the Techno System you will be in with modular not close to it as it is a modular system. Well done on the addiction. I know it's patchable, but aren't the 'standard' parameters like note and velocity hardwired under the hood? I would call that semi-modular, but it's splitting hairs.
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May 6, 2024 23:05
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