Cloud Rap
Space where the drums should be, and reverb filling every bit of it.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
Eight hits in bar one and none of them above velocity 112, which is the point: this is a beat mixed to sit behind the reverb rather than in front of it. The 808 lands on 1 and the and of 3 and sustains through everything in between. One clap, on beat 3, at 104, low enough that it marks the bar without leading it. Hats hold quarter notes at 52 and 44 with a single offbeat at 38, because a full sixteenth lane at this tempo turns the track into slow trap. Bar two opens the hats onto the offbeat eighths, adds 808 hits on the and of 2 and the e of 4, puts a soft clap on the last step, and finishes with the only open hat in the pattern. Swing 50 percent: at 68 bpm a swung sixteenth is 55 milliseconds late and reads as a mistake rather than as a groove.
What it is
A short-lived internet style from around 2010 that turned out to be permanently influential. Clams Casino, producing for Lil B and Main Attrakionz, took vocal samples from pop records, stretched and drowned them in reverb, and put an extremely slow half-time beat underneath. The tempo dropped into the sixties, the drums retreated to the back of the mix, and the harmonic content became a wash rather than a progression. It fed directly into the sound of Yung Lean, Bones and eventually a great deal of what became melodic rap and the hazier end of modern trap.
What it sounds like
Blurred. A vocal sample stretched past recognition and buried in a reverb tail measured in seconds, an enormous soft 808, a clap that arrives once a bar and is mixed lower than everything around it, and hats that are barely present. There is no clear attack anywhere: the sample has no transients left, the kick swells rather than hits, and the reverb tails overlap into a continuous wash. At 68 bpm each bar lasts nearly four seconds, so the arrangement has to be almost empty or the wash never clears.
Key elements
- The stretched vocalA sung phrase from another record, time-stretched two or three times longer, pitched and drowned in reverb until it functions as a pad rather than a voice.
- Reverb as the arrangementTails of four seconds or more on nearly everything. The reverb is not an effect on the parts; the parts are triggers for the reverb.
- Drums pushed backThe kit is mixed 6 to 10dB quieter than in trap and heavily filtered. It keeps time without ever being the focus, which is the reverse of the family's usual arrangement.
- Extreme half-timeOne clap per bar at 68 bpm, so nearly four seconds pass between backbeats. The tempo is the reason the wash has room to develop.
- No progressionA single chord or a two note figure held for the whole track. The interest comes from the texture changing, not from harmony going anywhere.
How to get them
- The sampleTime-stretch a vocal phrase to 200 or 300 percent with a low-quality algorithm, pitch it up four or five semitones, then send it to a hall at five seconds with the dry signal at 20 percent.
- 808Long, soft, no click, weight around 45Hz, with a slow 30 millisecond fade at the front so it swells. Two hits a bar means it has to sustain rather than punch.
- ClapMix it 8dB lower than you would in trap, low-pass it at 6kHz, and put it into the same hall as the sample so it belongs to the same room. It marks the bar rather than driving it.
- HatsQuarter notes and a few offbeats, nothing more, at velocities in the 30s and 40s. A full sixteenth hat lane will make the track sound like slow trap instead.
- MixHigh-pass every reverb return at 300Hz so the tails do not crowd the 808, and low-pass the master at 13kHz. Then check the wash actually clears before the next bar begins.
Reference points
Clams Casino, Lil B, Main Attrakionz, A$AP Rocky's earliest tapes, Yung Lean, Bones and Shlohmo. 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.