Big Beat
A breakbeat played through a wall of amplifiers and fuzz pedals.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
Two bars at 130, true tempo, and this is the only pattern in the family where the tempo question does not arise. The kick is on 1 and 3 with a pickup on the a of each, which is a rock drummer's figure rather than a jungle one. Snare on 2 and 4 at velocity 122 and above, with just two ghosts in the whole loop, because compression this heavy pulls quiet hits up to full volume anyway and programming a lot of them is wasted work. Tambourine runs offbeat eighths throughout. Bar two moves both kick pickups to the and of 2 and the e of 4, and ends on a full-strength snare on the last sixteenth, which is the pickup into the next phrase.
What it is
Britain, 1995 to 1999, and the Heavenly Social and Big Beat Boutique nights that gave it a name. The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and the Prodigy took the breakbeat out of hardcore, slowed it to rock tempo, made it enormous with compression and distortion, and put guitar samples and shouted vocals on top. It was designed for rooms that wanted rock energy from a DJ, and its production techniques, particularly the treatment of the drum bus, ended up everywhere in commercial music for a decade.
What it sounds like
Huge and dirty. A break compressed until the room noise between the hits is as loud as the hits, a fuzzed bassline that sounds like a guitar, and a filter sweeping across the whole mix. Tambourine, a screamed sample, a stop-start arrangement with a full bar of silence before the drop. It is the loudest-sounding music in this family and the least complicated rhythmically, which are related facts.
Key elements
- The slowed breakA funk break at 125 to 135 rather than 160. Slowing it down makes the individual hits longer and gives the compressor something to chew on.
- Brutal bus compressionThe drum bus squashed until the decay of every hit is pulled up to the level of its attack. That sound is the genre, more than any note choice.
- Fuzz bassA bass line through a guitar distortion, playing a blues-scale riff. Often sampled from an actual record, which is where the genre's legal history comes from.
- The filter sweepA resonant low-pass opening across eight or sixteen bars over the entire mix. Blunt, effective, and used on almost every record in the genre.
- Stop-start arrangementEverything cuts out for a bar, then returns at full volume. The dynamics are structural rather than performed, and they are what makes the records work in a rock venue.
How to get them
- Compress the bus, hardAn 1176-style compressor on the drum bus, ratio at 8 to 1, attack slow enough to let the transient through at about 10ms, release fast at 100ms, and 8 to 12dB of gain reduction. Then a second one after it doing another 3dB.
- Layer a live break with a machineA sampled break for the room and the grit, a 909 kick and clap underneath for the weight. Time-align them by hand or the low end will cancel.
- Tape saturationRun the whole drum bus through a tape or transformer emulation after the compression. It rounds off the transients you just amplified and stops the top end being painful.
- Fuzz the bassA guitar amp simulator on a bass patch, not a synth distortion. High-pass the distorted signal above 150Hz and run a clean sine underneath so it survives on a big system.
- Automate the filter by handDraw the sweep rather than using an LFO, and make it uneven. The best examples pause halfway up and then rush the last third.
Reference points
The Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, Propellerheads, Bentley Rhythm Ace, Lo Fidelity Allstars, and Skint, Wall of Sound and Heavenly as labels. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.