Digicore

What it is

The scene organised itself in Discord servers rather than in a city, which is the most important fact about it. Between roughly 2018 and 2021 a group of teenagers who had mostly never met made records together over voice calls and file uploads: glaive, ericdoa, midwxst, aldn, brakence, quinn, with Deadair Digital and a handful of Discords as the infrastructure. The sound is SoundCloud rap sped up and given a guitar loop, sitting somewhere between emo and trap without committing to either. The drums are trap drums running at 150 to 165, which means the backbeat is halftime and the hat rolls are twice as fast as they look. The 808 is clipped and does most of the melodic work under the vocal.

What it sounds like

Loud and thin on purpose, mixed to sound right on laptop speakers. Vocals are drenched in autotune with the retune time at zero, doubled, and often pitched up. Guitars are a two-bar acoustic or clean electric loop with a lot of noise floor left in, frequently sampled from another song. The 808 is short, clipped and slides between two notes. Snares are layered claps with a noise tail cut at 150 milliseconds. Hi-hats run rolls at thirty-second and sixty-fourth resolution with the pitch dropping through the roll. Everything is squashed to about minus 6 LUFS and nothing has any reverb except the vocal, which has a lot.

Key elements

• Halftime backbeat at a fast tempoOne real backbeat per bar, on beat 3, at 155. It gives the drums a slow feel while the hats and the vocal run at double speed, and it is why these records feel frantic and lazy at once.
• The 808 runThree or four consecutive sixteenths of 808 that slide between notes. It is a bassline, a fill and a rhythm part at the same time, and it is where the harmonic movement lives.
• Hat rollsRuns of three to six hats accelerating into a downbeat, usually below sixteenth resolution. The grid here shows where they start; the actual roll is programmed at thirty-seconds.
• The guitar loopTwo bars of acoustic or clean electric, sampled or played badly on purpose, looped for the whole track. It carries all of the harmony and it never develops.
• Clipping everywhereThe 808 and the master are both driven past zero. This is a scene that learned mixing from a laptop and a stock limiter and made a virtue of it.

How to get them

• Set the tempo before anything elsePick something between 150 and 165 and write the drums halftime against it. Writing at 78 and doubling later gives you a different hat feel, because the rolls end up quantised to the slow grid.
• 808A long sine with a pitch envelope dropping a fifth over 40 milliseconds, glide set to about 60 milliseconds, and a saturator after it driven until the fundamental buzzes. Sidechain the kick against it rather than mixing them separately.
• Vocal chainAutotune with the retune speed at zero and the key set to the guitar loop, then a doubler at 12 milliseconds, then a plate at 25 percent with a 200 millisecond pre-delay. Track it three times and pan two of them wide.
• Hat rollsDraw the roll at thirty-second resolution and pitch each hit down two semitones from the last across the run. Falling pitch is what makes a roll sound like it is being played rather than pasted.
• Find the guitar firstRecord or sample two bars of guitar and loop it before you write a drum. Everything in this style is built on top of a loop that was already emotionally finished.
• Mix it on a laptopReference on the worst speakers you own. These records live on phones, and a mix balanced on monitors will lose the vocal the moment it leaves your room.

Reference points

glaive, ericdoa, midwxst, aldn, brakence, quinn and Jane Remover, with Twikipedia and Kurtains producing and Deadair Digital as a label. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.