Boogie

What it is

Disco became commercially toxic in America almost overnight in 1979, and the records that carried on being made had to stop calling themselves disco. What they became was slower, tighter and more electronic. The LinnDrum and the Oberheim DMX arrived at the same moment, so a lot of boogie is a real bass player and a real keyboard player over a drum machine, and the sound of that hybrid is the genre. Tempos drop to the low hundred and tens, the kick stops playing four on the floor and starts syncopating with the bass, and the arrangements get shorter and more song-shaped. Nu-disco is essentially this period revisited, which is why there is no separate page for it here.

What it sounds like

Clean, tight and slightly plastic. The kick is a sampled acoustic drum from a machine, short and dry with no room. The snare has a hard crack and a gated reverb decision behind it, either a short plate or nothing at all. Hats tick sixteenths at a low level with very little variation. Over it: a slap or fingered electric bass playing the busiest part in the record, a Rhodes or a DX7 on eleventh chords, a Prophet or a Juno pad, and a vocal with a lot of harmony stacked behind it. The whole mix is drier and closer than a 1977 record.

Key elements

• A syncopated kickBeat 1, the a of 2, beat 3, and something late in the bar. Dropping the four-on-the-floor is the single clearest signal that a record is boogie rather than disco.
• Machine and player togetherProgrammed drums under a live bass and live keys. Neither element alone gives you the genre, and the small timing gap between them is most of the feel.
• Tight sixteenth hatsAll sixteen, downbeats near 72 and everything else near 44. Regular, but not flat, which is the difference from the Italo page.
• One open hat per barOn the and of 4 in bar one and the and of 2 in bar two. Moving it rather than repeating it is what a LinnDrum operator writing two-bar patterns actually did.
• The bass carries the recordSixteenth-note figures with slides and dead notes, played by a person. If it is not the loudest melodic thing in the mix, the arrangement is wrong.

How to get them

• DrumsUse LinnDrum or DMX samples rather than an 808. They are short sampled acoustic hits, and the specific quality of a boogie record is that the machine is imitating a kit and not quite managing.
• SnareLayer the machine snare with a very short plate at 0.4 seconds, high-passed at 600Hz, and gate the return. That is the era's snare in three moves.
• BassPlay it in, do not quantise it, and let it land two or three milliseconds ahead of the machine. That gap is what makes a boogie record breathe against a rigid drum part.
• KeysMinor elevenths on a Rhodes with a chorus pedal, doubled by a DX7 electric piano an octave up. Keep the voicings above middle C so the bass has the whole bottom.
• RimshotA dry machine rimshot on the and of 2 and the e of 4, at 52 to 60, with no reverb. It gives the middle of the bar something to hold onto without adding weight.
• Sidechain nothingNo pumping. These records were mixed on a desk with the bass and kick occupying different frequency ranges, so carve them apart with EQ instead of ducking one under the other.

Reference points

Kashif, Leroy Burgess, D Train, Change, Unlimited Touch, Evelyn King, and the Prelude, West End and Salsoul catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.