Bacardi

What it is

There is a Sunday afternoon party culture in the townships west and east of Pretoria, Atteridgeville and Mamelodi, and the drink people were buying at it gave the music its name. From about 2004 producers there took kwaito, which sits near 100, and ran it up past 120, then stripped the arrangement back to a kick, a rimshot and one looping synth figure. DJ Spoko and DJ Mujava were at the centre of it, and Mujava's Township Funk got picked up in London in 2008 by people with no context for it at all. The rhythmic idea is a kick that refuses both backbeats and a rimshot that answers in fast rolls, three strokes crowding the space before the next bar. Durban was listening, and so were the first amapiano records.

What it sounds like

Thin on purpose. The kick is short and tuned high for the tempo, the rimshot is dry and bright with no body under it, and there is usually one synth line, a cheap sawtooth or a bell patch, looping for four minutes without a chord change. A tom answers in the gaps and a shaker keeps the offbeats ticking. Bass is often just the kick with a little sub added rather than a separate part. Vocals when they appear are a shouted phrase or a sample rather than a verse. Mixes are bright and slightly harsh, made on cheap monitors and tested at the taxi rank, and the top end is where all the information is.

Key elements

• A kick that avoids 2 and 4Beat 1, the a of 1, beat 3, the and of 3 and the and of 4. Neither backbeat gets a kick, which leaves both of them to the rimshot on its own.
• The rimshot rollAfter the beat 4 stroke, three more fill the e, the and and the a of the last beat, rising from 60 to 88. Bar two answers with a second roll across the back half of beat 2.
• Tempo borrowed upwardKwaito runs near 100. This runs near 126 with the same synths and the same arrangement thinking, and everything about how a dancer moves to it changes.
• One figure, no chordsA single monophonic synth line looping for the length of the record. The arrangement happens by muting and unmuting parts, not by writing new ones.
• Toms in the holesFour strokes in bar one, on the and of 1, the e of 2, the e of 3 and the a of 3, none of which the kick or the rimshot is using. Bar two adds a fifth on the e of 1.

How to get them

• Move the tempo firstTake a kwaito loop at 100 and shift the project to 126 without re-recording anything. The parts that survive the move intact are the ones bacardi kept, and the ones that fall apart are the ones it dropped.
• KickShort, tuned around 70Hz, decay under 150 milliseconds. It is a rhythm part here rather than a floor, so it has to stop before the next one arrives.
• Build the rollThree rimshot strokes on the last three sixteenths of the bar, rising about fourteen velocity steps each. Nudge them slightly early rather than quantising hard, because a roll exactly on the grid reads as a fill instead of a push.
• Rimshot soundA side stick sample high-passed at 500Hz with no shell tone under it. Anything with body in it turns the rolls to mush at this tempo.
• Tune the tomOne tom sample, tuned to the fifth of the synth riff, decay around 250 milliseconds. It is answering the rimshot rather than filling, so four strokes a bar is the whole part.
• Straight gridSwing 0.5. The rolls already lean because they are placed by hand, and swing on top widens the gaps between the three strokes unevenly.

Reference points

DJ Spoko, DJ Mujava, Spoek Mathambo, Rudeboyz on the Durban side of what came next, and the Bacardi Sunday parties in Atteridgeville and Mamelodi. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.