Bleep Techno
Sub bass from a sound system, and almost nothing else in the room.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
There are only three hi-hat hits in each bar, which is the whole point: the space belongs to the sub. The conga carries the syncopation instead, sitting on the a of each beat with a lighter hit on the e of 4 in the first bar. One open hat per bar, and it moves from the and of 4 in bar one to the and of 2 in bar two, so the two bars lean in different directions. Bar two also adds a ghost kick on the a of 3 and a quiet second clap on the and of 4, which reads as a delay repeat rather than a new hit.
What it is
Northern England, 1989 to 1991, mostly Sheffield and Leeds. Unique 3, LFO, Nightmares on Wax and Forgemasters made records for the Warp shop and its label, and what came out was Detroit techno filtered through Jamaican sound system culture. The bass is the record. A bleep track is a sine wave at the bottom, a few high square-wave tones on top, and a large amount of nothing in between, arranged so that a big rig has something to do. It was over within two years, absorbed into hardcore, but it is the direct ancestor of dubstep and of every UK record that has treated bass weight as the primary instrument.
What it sounds like
A near-sine sub that you feel before you hear, moving in slow pentatonic steps. Above it, short bright tones that sound like a test signal, panned wide and drenched in delay. The drums are 808 and 909 samples, spaced out, with congas doing more work than the hats. There is a lot of silence, and the silence is what makes the bass land when it comes back in.
Key elements
- The subA sine or triangle below 80Hz playing a simple riff. It is the melody and the bassline at once, and nothing else in the arrangement competes with it.
- BleepsShort square or pulse tones in a high register, usually two or three notes, heavily delayed. They function as percussion as much as melody.
- SpaceLong stretches where only the drums and the sub are playing. The arrangement works by removal rather than by layering.
- Congas over hatsAn 808 conga or a high conga sample carrying the syncopation while the hats stay minimal. This is the sound system inheritance.
- Dub delayA quarter-note or dotted-eighth delay with feedback that you push on individual hits, sending single notes spinning off into the mix.
How to get them
- SubOne sine oscillator, no filter movement, a short fade at each note end to stop clicks. Keep it strictly mono and let it reach 45Hz, then check on headphones because your monitors will lie to you.
- BleepsA square wave with no filter, a very short decay, and pitch high enough to sit two octaves above everything. Send it to a ping-pong delay at around 380ms with heavy feedback.
- Kick and sub togetherThe kick and the sub occupy the same octave, so duck the sub by six to eight decibels on each kick with a fast release. Without that the low end turns to porridge.
- DrumsMix 808 and 909: an 808 kick for weight, a 909 clap and hats for snap. Leave the hats sparse and let the conga carry the movement.
- ShufflePush the swing to around 56 percent on the percussion. Bleep records lope, which is what separates them from the German records that came after.
- ArrangementBuild with three elements and drop two of them for eight bars at a time. If you are ever playing more than four things at once you have gone wrong.
Reference points
LFO, Unique 3, Forgemasters, Nightmares on Wax, Sweet Exorcist, Ital Rockers, and the early Warp catalogue. Named to point at a sound, not as endorsements.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.