Funk

What it is

Cincinnati, 1970, King Records. James Brown had spent five years pulling his band away from chord changes and towards rhythm, and by the time Clyde Stubblefield and John Starks were splitting the drum chair an arrangement was mostly one vamp with every player holding down a percussion part. The guitar plays on the offbeat and almost never sustains. The bass plays a figure rather than a line. The horns punctuate and get out. What holds it together is beat one, hit harder than anything else in the bar, and a shared understanding that the whole band lands on it together no matter how far out the previous three beats travelled. Everything else in this family descends from records made this way, including the four-on-the-floor ones.

What it sounds like

A dry room and almost no reverb. The kick is a 22-inch drum with a felt beater and a pillow against the head, thudding rather than booming. The snare is tuned high and cracks, with the wires slack enough that ghost notes buzz instead of speaking. Hats sit half open more often than people remember, hissing underneath the sixteenths. Over that: a clean single-coil guitar chopping a chord on the offbeat, an electric bass with flatwounds and the tone rolled back, horns arriving in short stabs and leaving. Nothing sustains. If a part is ringing, it is in the way.

Key elements

• The OneBeat one carries the largest kick in the bar and the whole band hits it together. Every piece of syncopation in the three beats after it is only legible because that landing is guaranteed.
• Ghost notesSnare hits between 25 and 45 in velocity, filling the sixteenths either side of the backbeat. They are what a drum machine cannot fake and what makes the part sound like a person.
• Sixteenths on the hatThe right hand keeps sixteenths running the whole bar, with a hard accent on each downbeat and a whisper on the e and the a. That dynamic spread carries the tempo so the kick does not have to.
• Every instrument is percussionGuitar, clavinet and bass are all playing rhythm parts that happen to have notes in them. Write them as drum parts first and choose the pitches afterwards.
• One chord, heldA vamp that lasts eight minutes and moves once, into a bridge, before coming back. Harmonic movement is the thing being withheld on purpose.

How to get them

• KickSample or synthesise a short, dead acoustic kick with no sub tail. Tune it around 60Hz, cut everything under 40Hz, and put the beat-one hit ten or twelve velocity steps above everything else in the lane.
• Snare and the ghostsUse two different snare samples: a hard hit for the backbeat and a separate quiet buzz for the ghosts. One sample turned down sounds like a sample turned down, and that is the most common way this genre goes wrong.
• Hi-hatSixteenths, downbeats near 90 and the in-between hits between 38 and 48. Then open one of them for a single sixteenth somewhere in the bar and move it in the second bar.
• GuitarA ninth chord, played with the picking hand muting between strokes, on the offbeat sixteenths only. Compress it hard so the scratch of the muted strokes is as loud as the chord.
• BassFlatwound strings, tone rolled back to about a third, played with fingers. Lock the bass to the kick lane exactly, then take one note away so it is not simply a doubling.
• Play it inRecord the drums from a pad controller in one take rather than drawing them. Quantise at 40 percent strength at most. The timing errors are the genre and flattening them removes it.

Reference points

James Brown, Clyde Stubblefield, John Jabo Starks, Bootsy Collins, Maceo Parker, the JB's, and the King and People catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.