Big Room

What it is

Ultra 2013, and the same six records were played by everyone on the bill. This is what the main stage settled on between roughly 2012 and 2016: Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike, Martin Garrix, Hardwell, W and W, Blasterjaxx, and a Beatport chart that looked more or less identical for four years. It is worth being straight about the genre, because the grid will not tell you anything. This is a house pattern. Kick on the four, clap on 2 and 4, and if you strip a drop back to its drums you have something a 909 could have produced in 1987. The identity sits in two objects: a kick sample tuned, layered and clipped into an instrument in its own right, and a supersaw stack playing one chord at a time with nothing in the bar to distract from it. Learning to build those two things is learning the style.

What it sounds like

Enormous and nearly bare. The kick is the loudest element by a wide margin, tuned to the key of the track, with a punch layer around 90Hz, a sub tail lasting most of a beat and a click on top. The clap is three or four layers with a gated room behind it. Above that sits the supersaw: seven detuned saw oscillators per note, spread wide, holding a single chord that changes once a bar. There are often no hi-hats in a drop whatsoever. The bass is a sine following the chord root, ducked so hard it works as a rhythm part. Everything else, the risers and the impacts and the reverse cymbals, lives in the build rather than the drop.

Key elements

• The kick as an instrumentThree layers tuned to the root: a click above 2kHz, a punch at 90Hz and a sub tail near 50Hz running about 250ms. Clipped rather than limited, so the top of the waveform is flat and the loudness is built in.
• A supersaw, and what it isSeven saw oscillators per voice, detuned across a spread of about 40 cents, each at a different stereo position and starting phase. One chord, held for a bar, high-passed at 300Hz so the kick keeps the bottom.
• The drop with the middle taken outThree sixteenths of dead air after six of the seven kicks in the loop. Drops of this kind carry almost no top end, because the kick and the supersaw between them are already using all of it.
• A four sixteenth clap rollBeat four of bar two has no kick and four claps climbing 70, 82, 96 and 112 instead. It is the one fill the style uses, and it happens every two bars.
• One crashA single cymbal on the downbeat of the loop. In an arrangement it lands on the first bar of the drop and then stays away for eight more.

How to get them

• Build the kickLayer a punch sample and a sine tail tuned to the root, then a click. Bus them, clip 4dB off the peak, and high-pass the rest of the mix at 120Hz. The kick is most of the mix.
• SupersawSeven saws per note, detune spread near 40 cents, unison width wide, one octave. High-pass at 300Hz, then a short 1.2 second hall and a stereo widener acting above 2kHz only.
• Leave the bar aloneResist filling the gaps between the kicks. A hat pattern in a drop like this makes it smaller, because the ear is then given something to measure the kick against.
• Sidechain hard16dB of ducking on the supersaw and the sub with a 200ms release and a hard knee. The pump is not decoration here, it is how the chord and the kick share the same three notes.
• The clap rollFour claps on beat four of the second bar, velocities 70, 82, 96 and 112, with the kick muted underneath them. Program them by hand and swap the sample on the last one.
• Tune the kick to the trackPitch the sub tail to the root of the key. An untuned kick against a held minor chord beats against it, and on a large system that beating is the difference between loud and painful.

Reference points

Dimitri Vegas and Like Mike, Martin Garrix, Hardwell, W and W, Blasterjaxx, and the Spinnin and Revealed catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.