Electro House

What it is

Justice's Cross came out in 2007 on Ed Banger and made a virtue of clipping. That record, the Boys Noize catalogue around it and a parallel American strand through Wolfgang Gartner and Deadmau5 are what the phrase covers now: house tempo, a bassline built out of distortion rather than out of filtering, and an arrangement pointed at a field rather than a basement. The name is unfair to Detroit, which had the word first and meant something quite different by it. What matters here is that the bass stopped being a support part. It plays the hook, it occupies the midrange a guitar would occupy, and everything else in the mix is carved out to let it through. The drums got louder to keep up, which is where the crash on the downbeat and the eighth note hats come from.

What it sounds like

Bright and clipped. The kick is short and tuned, the clap is layered two or three deep and gated hard, and a crash sits on the first beat of nearly every bar. Hats run in eighths with the offbeat pushed a long way up, so the top end covers a wide dynamic range without ever playing sixteenths. The bass is a saw or a square through a soft clipper, a bit crusher and a resonant filter, with the filter envelope retriggered on every note. Everything above 200Hz is compressed until it stops moving. Sidechain is deep and short, and the mix breathes rather than pumps.

Key elements

• Bass as the leadThe bassline sits between 150Hz and 2kHz and carries the hook. Sub is a separate quiet layer underneath, because distortion eats low end and the room still needs some.
• Eighth note hats, hard accentClosed hats on the eighths with the offbeats at 96 against 52 on the beats. That single accent is the whole hat part and it does not want sixteenths underneath it.
• A crash on the downbeatOne cymbal on beat one of each bar, high-passed so it does not swamp the clap. In an arrangement it marks bars rather than phrases, which is part of why this style sounds relentless.
• The push into the next barAn extra kick on the and of 4 at the end of every two bars. In most of these records it is the sole rhythmic variation, and it does a great deal of work.
• Soft clipping, not saturationA clipper shaving three or four decibels off the peak of the bass rather than a tape or tube model. The harmonics it adds are odd and buzzy, and that buzz is the sound.

How to get them

• KickShort, about 140ms, tuned to the root, with the click layer high-passed at 1.5kHz and blended in separately. Clip the top of it rather than limiting, so the transient stays square.
• BassOne saw into a soft clipper, then a resonant low-pass with a high envelope amount and a decay near 120ms. Retrigger the envelope on every note and automate the cutoff by hand across eight bars.
• HatsEighths only. Offbeat at 96, downbeat at 52, and resist the sixteenths. Put the open hat on the and of 4 and pull the closed hat off that step so nothing chokes.
• ClapTwo claps and a short noise burst bussed together, gated at 90ms and compressed at 6 to 1. A tail longer than that fights the eighth note hats for the same space.
• SidechainDuck the bass and everything harmonic from the kick, about 6dB with a 120ms release. Shorter than the house pump, because the bass has to be back at full level by the next eighth.
• Mix the crash quietlyAround 12dB under the clap and high-passed at 500Hz. It should register as an impact rather than as a cymbal you could name if asked.

Reference points

Justice, Boys Noize, Wolfgang Gartner, Deadmau5, Fake Blood, and the Ed Banger, Boysnoize and Mau5trap catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.