Footwork

What it is

Chicago, from the mid 2000s, and the fastest branch of ghetto house and juke. The music exists for dance battles, which is why it is built the way it is: a relentless 808 kick pattern in rolling triplets, a backbeat that is not where you expect it, and a single vocal sample chopped and repeated until it stops being language. DJ Rashad and DJ Spinn brought it to a wider audience through Hyperdub from 2011, and Rashad's Double Cup remains the record most people start with. The rhythm is deliberately hard to settle into, because the dancer is supposed to be finding a place in it rather than following it.

What it sounds like

Sparse and fast. Long stretches of nothing but an 808 kick rolling in threes, a hand clap arriving where a snare should not be, and a vocal fragment stuttering on a loop. Where a chord appears it is a single soul or R and B sample, often left slightly out of tune and out of time. There is very little in the mix at any moment, which is what allows a triplet kick figure at 160 to remain legible.

Key elements

• Triplet kick rollsThe kick moving in groups of three against a bar of four. This is the genre's central figure and it is the thing a sixteenth-note grid cannot show honestly.
• The displaced backbeatThe snare or 808 hit lands on beat 3 rather than on 2 and 4. Hearing that once tells you what genre you are listening to.
• Claps off the gridHand claps on 2 and 4, or in threes, running against the kick. Two conflicting groupings at once is what makes the rhythm feel unresolved.
• The chopped vocalOne phrase, cut to a syllable, repeated eight or sixteen times with the pitch and the slice point moving. It functions as a percussion part, not as a vocal.
• EmptinessWhole beats with a single kick and nothing else. At 160 the ear needs the space to track the triplet groupings at all.

How to get them

• Program in tripletsSwitch the sequencer grid to eighth-note triplets and build the kick figure there, then switch back to sixteenths for the claps. Working in one resolution throughout is why most attempts at this sound wrong.
• 808 kick with pitchLong decay, tuned to the sample's key, and move it between two or three notes across the bar. The kick is carrying the bassline and the rhythm at once.
• Chop one sample onlyTake a single four-bar loop, slice it, and build the whole track from those slices. Restricting yourself to one source is the practical reason footwork tracks sound coherent despite the rhythmic chaos.
• Clap layeringTwo claps a few milliseconds apart, panned slightly differently, with a short room at 0.3 seconds. The small offset is what stops a repeated clap sounding like a machine.
• Do not fill the gapsResist adding hats or percussion to the empty beats. The genre depends on the listener being able to count the kick groupings, and anything else in there makes that impossible.

Reference points

DJ Rashad, DJ Spinn, RP Boo, Traxman, Jlin, DJ Manny, and Hyperdub, Planet Mu and Teklife as labels. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.