Dungeon Sound

What it is

Big Apple Records on Surrey Street in Croydon sold garage twelves to a teenage South London clientele, and by 2001 the people behind the counter and in the back room were making their own. Horsepower Productions, El-B, Zed Bias and Groove Chronicles were taking 2-step apart: the sung vocal went, the strings went, and what was left was a kick pattern with holes in it, a rimmed snare and a great deal of space filled with dub delay. Promoters called it dark garage at the time. Dungeon sound is the name that stuck to the Croydon end of it, and everything else on this page descends from it. Dubstep is what happened when the feel halved and the bass got heavier. Grime is what happened when the swing came off and someone started rapping.

What it sounds like

Cavernous. A snare with the crack taken off it, a kick that is more thud than click, and a tape echo on nearly everything, feedback set high enough that two hits smear into six. The sub sits low and holds notes rather than sliding, which is the opposite of what garage was doing with it. Melodic material is a minor stab off an Akai sampler or a pitched-down string line, mixed quieter than you expect it to be. Reverb is a two second plate on the percussion, high-passed so it never meets the low end. The whole record is meant to sound like a room with hard walls and no windows.

Key elements

• The 2-step skeletonKicks in the gaps and a snare left alone on 2 and 4, inherited from garage intact. The rhythm is not the new part here; the treatment of it is.
• Delay as an instrumentA tape echo at a dotted eighth on the snare and the hand percussion, three or four repeats deep. It fills the bars that have nothing else in them.
• A sub that stays putOne note per chord, sine, no portamento. The moving jungle-derived bass of garage is deliberately refused, because movement down there would make the track feel quick.
• Timbale and tabla hitsHand percussion on the offbeats, lifted from dub records and from Eastern strings compilations, doing the job garage gave to shuffled hats.
• The hole where the vocal wasThe mid-range is left empty. Removing the sung hook from 2-step and then refusing to replace it is most of what defines this sound.

How to get them

• SnareA tight acoustic snare low-passed at 6kHz so it loses its edge, with a two second plate behind it high-passed at 400Hz. Aim for a slap in a stairwell rather than a crack.
• DelayTape delay at a dotted eighth, feedback around 45 percent, repeats low-passed at 3kHz. Automate the send up on the snare before the turnaround and back down straight after it.
• KickA soft 909 kick under a sampled acoustic one, sub layer tuned to the root, decaying over about 200 milliseconds. Longer than a garage kick, shorter than a dubstep kick.
• TimbaleOne sample pitched two ways, on the and of 1 and the a of 3. Pan them 20 percent apart and send only the quieter of the two to the delay.
• BassA sine with about 15 percent saw mixed in, low-passed at 200Hz, holding whole notes under the chord. Resist adding glide; the stillness is what makes the drums sound busy.
• Swing0.6, high enough that the hats still lope the way a garage record does. That lope is the audible evidence of where this music came from.

Reference points

Horsepower Productions, El-B, Groove Chronicles, Zed Bias and Menta, plus the Tempa and Ammunition records that grew out of Big Apple. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.