Doomcore

What it is

The obvious response to a scene competing on tempo is to go the other way, and a small group of producers did exactly that in the mid nineties. Low Entropy, Temple Of Doom, and later the Kernkrach and Doomcore Records orbit slowed the hardcore kick to walking pace and kept every other property of it: the distortion, the length, the tuning, the refusal to sit inside a mix. At 88 a single kick occupies most of a second, so the gaps become the structure. It is closer in feel to doom metal or to a dark ambient record than to anything else in this family, and it is the one corner of the family anyone has ever called patient.

What it sounds like

Enormous individual hits with a lot of air between them. The kick is long enough that you hear its whole envelope, which never happens at 180, and the distortion reads as texture rather than as aggression. Around it: a held minor pad, a bell, a sample of a choir slowed until it wobbles, and reverb tails measured in seconds. The snare is a single crack halfway through the bar with a huge room on it. Nothing repeats quickly enough to be a groove, and the effect is more oppressive than fast music manages.

Key elements

• Space as the main elementLong gaps with nothing in them at all. At this tempo one empty step lasts a sixth of a second and they arrive in runs of three and seven, so the gaps are as much of the arrangement as the hits are.
• The kick heard wholeA hardcore kick at 88 rings for nearly a full beat, so the attack, the pitch drop and the distorted tail are all separately audible. Producing it means shaping all three.
• One crack on beat 3A single distorted snare halfway through the bar, drenched in a four second hall. It carries the whole backbeat and it arrives once a bar, which at 88 is every two and three quarter seconds.
• Held harmonyOne minor chord or a single drone for the length of a section, moving only in filter. Because the drums are so sparse, this is what carries the track.
• Reverb as an instrumentTails of three to six seconds on almost everything, long enough that they overlap the next hit. The wash between hits is deliberate rather than a mixing accident.

How to get them

• Do not just slow a kick downRepitching a 180bpm kick to 88 makes it flabby. Build it at this tempo: a 60Hz sine with a pitch drop over 80ms, a distorted mid layer, and a tail of 500 to 700ms shaped by hand.
• Leave beats outThree or four kick hits a bar, not eight. Write the pattern, then delete a third of it and listen again. It will almost always be better.
• Long reverb, high-passedA four second hall on the snare and the pad, with the reverb return high-passed at 300Hz so the tails do not muddy the kick. Without that filter the whole thing turns to fog.
• Slow the samplesTake a choir or string sample and drop it four to seven semitones with a poor quality algorithm. The wobble and the artefacts are the point, so do not use a good time-stretch.
• Write in eight bar unitsAt 88 an eight bar phrase runs twenty two seconds. Plan the arrangement in minutes rather than in bars, or the track will end before anything has developed.

Reference points

Low Entropy, Temple Of Doom, Fifth Era, Mono Junk in his slower work, and the Doomcore Records and Praxis catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound rather than endorsements.