Drill'n'Bass

What it is

Squarefusher's Feed Me Weird Things and Aphex Twin's Hangable Auto Bulb, both 1996, and the small group of records around them. The idea was to take jungle's chopping and push it to the point where it stopped being danceable, while keeping the harmonic content of fusion and jazz underneath. Tom Jenkinson played fretless bass over it. Richard James used a sequencer to generate patterns nobody would program by hand. The difference from breakcore, which arrived shortly after, is that drill'n'bass is quiet in places and cares about the notes.

What it sounds like

Skittering. Snare rolls that accelerate and stop dead, long stretches where only a bassline and a Rhodes are playing, and then eight beats of drums arriving at once. The drum sounds are clean and small rather than distorted, often a 909 or a lightly processed break. Melodically it is closer to Weather Report than to anything in a club, and the contrast between the calm harmony and the violent drums is the whole idea.

Key elements

• The accelerating rollA run of consecutive snare hits climbing in velocity into a downbeat. Programmed rather than played, and usually faster at the end than a drummer could manage.
• Sparse kickTwo or three kicks a bar at most. All the density lives in the snare, which is what keeps the low end clear enough for a bassline to be audible.
• Real silenceGaps left open rather than filled in. Breakcore packs every subdivision; drill'n'bass stops a roll dead and lets the hole do the work, and here the snare vanishes for a whole beat before the last three hits.
• Melodic bassA fretless or a synth playing a walking, chromatic line with actual voice leading. It is the element that survives when the drums drop out.
• Sequencer artefactsPatterns generated by probability, arpeggiator abuse or a Cubase feature used wrong, then edited. Aphex Twin's early records are full of figures nobody would arrive at by taste.

How to get them

• Build rolls with velocityDraw a run of sixteenths, then ramp the velocity from about 55 up to 118 across it. A flat roll sounds like a stuck key, and the ramp is the entire illusion of a drummer.
• Use one snare, many pitchesRepitch the same snare across a roll by two or three semitones. It stops consecutive identical samples phasing into a buzz, which is the machine-gun effect nobody wants.
• Chop from a clean breakUse something dry like the Funky Drummer rather than the Amen. The Amen's room sound smears at this edit density, and drill'n'bass needs every hit to be individually audible.
• Write the harmony separatelyCompose eight or sixteen bars of chords and bass with no drums at all, get it working as music, then cut the drums over it. Doing it the other way round gives you rhythm with nothing underneath.
• Automate the drop-outsMute the drum bus for a beat and a half at a time, in places that are not bar boundaries. The unpredictability of where the silence lands is doing more work than the fills.

Reference points

Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert, Cylob, mu-Ziq, and Rephlex, Warp and Planet Mu as labels. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.