Florida Breaks

What it is

The Edge in Orlando had a sound system with more low end than sense, and DJ Icey spent the mid nineties making records specifically for it. Florida breaks is what you get when Miami bass car audio culture meets UK breakbeat: the tempo comes from England, the obsession with sub-bass comes from four hundred miles down the coast, and the arrangement comes from neither. There is very little in these tracks. A kick, a break with everything under 200Hz removed, a sub bass playing a two note figure, and a vocal sample. That is often the entire record. The scene had its own label network, Zone and Kaos Sounds among them, and for about six years Orlando exported more breakbeat than anywhere in America.

What it sounds like

Enormous at the bottom and almost nothing anywhere else. The kick is short, tuned low and mixed loud. The break is thin by design, high-passed hard so it does not touch the sub, and there is very little of it. The bass is a sine or a filtered square doing two or three notes across two bars, and it goes down to 40Hz because the cars had subwoofers. Above that, a vocal snippet, a filtered noise sweep and long stretches of nothing. Reverb is minimal. A lot of these records sound thin on small speakers, which is a mixing decision and not a mistake.

Key elements

• The sub as the whole arrangementTwo or three notes across two bars, sitting at 40 to 70Hz. On a club rig it is the loudest element in the track and everything else is programmed to stay out of its way.
• The break guttedHigh-passed at 200Hz or more, so it contributes snare, hats and room and no weight at all. It sounds wrong soloed and correct in the mix, which is the whole approach.
• The dotted hatHi-hats on the a of a beat rather than the offbeat eighth, giving the pattern a slight limp. It is the tell that separates a Florida track from a UK one at the same tempo.
• Space instead of layersFour or five elements total. There is no pad, no chord and usually no second melodic part, and adding one is generally what stops a track sounding like this.
• The vocal hookOne phrase from a rap record, pitched and repeated every eight bars. It is doing the job a chorus would do in music that has no other structural markers.

How to get them

• Tune the kick to the roomA short 808 or 909 kick, tuned to about 50Hz, with a 200ms decay and no click. Then check it on a subwoofer, because the whole style is built for a system that reproduces 40Hz and most nearfields do not.
• High-pass higher than feels rightStart at 200Hz and keep going until the break has no body left. On a big system the sub fills that gap in completely, and a break with any weight in it will smear the low end.
• Two notes and no moreWrite the bassline as a root and one other note across two bars, with a 40ms slide between them. If you find yourself writing a third note, take the second one out instead.
• Put the hats on the aClosed hats on the last sixteenth of beats 1, 2 and 3 rather than on the offbeat eighths. It is a small change and it is most of why these records shuffle without any swing being applied.
• Mono under 100HzSum everything below 100Hz to mono before it hits the master. Car systems and club rigs both fold to mono at the bottom, and a stereo sub loses about half its level when they do.
• Arrange like a DJ toolThirty two bars of drums with no bass, then thirty two with. Long intros and outros with nothing but the kick and the break, because these were made to be beatmatched by hand for eight bars.

Reference points

DJ Icey, Rabbit In The Moon, Baby Anne, DJ Sharaz, Huda Hudia, and the Zone and Kaos Sounds labels. Given as reference points for the sound rather than as endorsements.