Funk Mandelao

What it is

Sao Paulo took Rio's funk and removed most of it. Mandelao is named after the Jardim Mandela area on the eastern edge of the city, and it grew up on fluxos, street parties running off car sound systems, where the only thing that matters is what a subwoofer does to a wall. The producers, many of them still in their teens, cut the percussion down to almost nothing and made the bass drum play the tune: hits in pairs, tuned low, distorted, with long silences between the pairs. It is the one genre in this family where the kick genuinely carries the record and the percussion is decoration, and it is worth hearing next to the tamborzao to understand how far that is from Rio.

What it sounds like

Enormous and stripped back. A bass drum tuned somewhere near 45Hz, saturated until it buzzes, playing doubled hits so the second one arrives before the first has decayed. A clap on 2 and 4 with almost no body. A cabasa or shaker rattling in the gaps. Everything else is voice: chopped MC phrases, a pitched vocal stab, sometimes just one word repeated. Records are mixed to sound correct on a phone speaker and on a car boot rig at the same time, which means the midrange of the vocal is pushed and the low end is allowed to distort rather than being controlled.

Key elements

• Doubled bass drum hitsTwo kicks a sixteenth apart, then space. The pair reads as one long note with a stutter at the front, and it is the signature of the whole scene.
• Space between the pairsFour or five sixteenths with no bass drum in them. A crowded arrangement kills this; the pairs need somewhere to arrive from.
• A thin clap2 and 4, no reverb, high-passed hard so it does not compete with the bass drum. It is there to keep the count, not to hit anybody.
• Distortion as tuningThe bass drum is driven until the harmonics fill the low mids. That distortion is what makes it audible on a phone, which is where most of the audience hears it.
• Vocal as the melodyChopped MC phrases carry every melodic idea in the track. There is often no synth of any kind in the arrangement.

How to get them

• Write the pairs firstPlace two kicks a sixteenth apart, leave several steps of nothing, then place the next pair. Get the whole bar working with just that before you add anything else.
• Tune the kickA sine at around 45Hz with a 400 millisecond decay, then a wave shaper on top set so the fundamental survives but the second and third harmonics come up hard.
• Check it on a phoneBounce and listen on a phone speaker before you touch the mix. If the kick disappears, add saturation rather than volume, because the speaker cannot reproduce the fundamental at all.
• Keep the hats invisibleClosed hats under velocity 50, on the and of each beat, and no open hat anywhere. Anything brighter starts to fill the space the pairs need.
• Chop the vocalTake one phrase, slice it at transients, and rearrange it against the kick pairs so the syllables land where the bass drum does not.
• Do not swing it0.5. A doubled kick a sixteenth apart is already at the edge of what reads as two events, and any swing at all turns the pair into a flam.

Reference points

DJ Arana, MC Rick, DJ Guuga, DJ Blakes, MC Kevin o Chris on the Rio side of the same argument, and the Sao Paulo fluxos the sound was built for. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.