Brostep

What it is

Rusko coined the word himself, in an interview, about his own records, and he did not mean it kindly. Cockney Thug and the run of tracks around it moved the interest of dubstep from the sub to the mid-range, and by 2011 that was what most of the world meant by the genre: Skrillex, Doctor P, Flux Pavilion, a festival stage, and a bass sound that screams rather than rumbles. The drums thickened to match. Where deep dubstep gives you a kick, a snare and space, this puts a crash on the downbeat, sixteenth hats all the way through, a second snare in the back half of the bar and enough kicks to read as a fill. Tearout is the harder, faster-cutting cousin of the same construction and it lives on this grid too.

What it sounds like

Distortion at every stage. The bass is a saw or a square run through waveshaping, bit reduction, formant filters and phasers, automated so violently that the timbre changes every eighth note. Growls, screeches and talking robot noises come from LFOs on formant and comb filters rather than from samples. Drums are compressed hard and layered three deep, with a crash on every downbeat and reverse cymbals into every drop. The mix is loud and bright, the sub is often a separate quiet layer under all that noise, and the top end above 8kHz is deliberately harsh.

Key elements

• Mid-range as the leadThe bass sits between 300Hz and 3kHz where a vocal or a guitar would be, and it carries the melody, the rhythm and the aggression at once.
• Timbre changing per noteEvery eighth or sixteenth gets a different processing chain, automated or drawn in by hand, so the drop never repeats a sound twice in a row.
• A crash on the downbeatCymbal on 1 of every bar and often again at the halfway point. It is what makes the drop sound like a band arriving rather than a loop starting.
• Sixteenth hats throughoutA full hat pulse under the half-time snare, so the top end is doing 140 while the backbeat is doing 70. Density here is what separates this from the deep end.
• A second snare late in the barAn extra hit on beat 4 or the a of 4 to push into the next bar. Deep dubstep would never, and that difference is audible in one listen.

How to get them

• GrowlA saw into a comb filter with the delay time on an LFO, then a waveshaper, then a resonant band-pass at 800Hz. Automate the comb time in eighth-note steps and record the automation live.
• Keep the sub separateRun a clean mono sine under the growl and high-pass the growl at 120Hz. Distortion eats low end, so the part that shakes the room must never go through it.
• DrumsLayer three snares, a body around 200Hz, a crack around 2kHz and a noise tail, then bus compress at 4 to 1 with a 10 millisecond attack so they hit as one object.
• CrashOne bright crash on the downbeat, high-passed at 400Hz, with a reversed copy of it running into the bar so the drop announces itself a beat early.
• HatsSixteenths at 80, 52, 68, 52 across each beat, then choose two places per eight bars to break into something faster. Everywhere else, leave the pulse alone.
• Swing50 percent and no argument. Nothing in this style is shuffled, and the machine-gun rigidity of the hats is part of what the aggression is made of.

Reference points

Rusko, Caspa, Doctor P, Flux Pavilion, Skrillex, Zomboy and Excision, on Circus, Never Say Die and OWSLA. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.