Future Garage
Garage timing and half-time weight, soaked in tape hiss and rain.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
This grid sits between the two feels on purpose. The snare hits beat 3 at 104, which is half-time, while the kicks and hats keep doing 2-step at 130. Kick on 1, the a of 2 and the a of 3 in bar one; bar two moves the second to the a of 1 and the third to the and of 3, so no two bars agree. Ghost snares under velocity 52 scatter around the main hit: the a of 1 and the e of 4 in bar one, the e of 2, the e of 4 and the a of 4 in bar two. Hats sit only on the e at 40 and the a at 58 and never on the beat, with 0.58 swing dragging both late, and the last two in bar two lifted to 44 and 50. The open hat is quiet, 78 on the a of 4 in bar one and 74 on the and of 2 in bar two, and it wants to be a reversed cymbal rather than a clean hat. The rim click marks 2 and 4 low in the mix so the pulse survives all that blur, with one extra on the and of 4 to close bar two.
What it is
Untrue arrived on Hyperdub in 2007 with drums that sounded as though they had been cut out of a cassette with scissors, and a lot of producers heard permission in it. Future garage is the name that attached to what followed: 2-step's kick placement and its shuffle, slowed to around 130, with the backbeat dragged back to a half-time position and the whole thing buried under vinyl crackle, tape hiss and long reverb. It is the most atmospheric corner of this family and the least interested in a dancefloor. What gives it tension is that the two feels are arguing: the kicks and the hats are still garage, moving at 130, while the snare insists the record is at 65 and neither side wins.
What it sounds like
Wet and degraded. Drums are one-shot samples run through tape saturation, bit reduction and a touch of pitch wobble, so no two hits are quite identical. The snare is soft and distant, often a rimshot or a clicked finger rather than a drum. Vocals are chopped from R and B records, pitched, gender-ambiguous, and reversed as often as not. Pads are minor sevenths on a warm synth, sidechained gently to the kick, with a six second reverb behind everything and the return high-passed at 300Hz. Underneath: a soft sine sub that slides between notes and never gets aggressive.
Key elements
- Two feels at onceGarage kick placement under a half-time backbeat. The listener can hear the record either way, and the good ones keep both readings available.
- Degraded drumsEvery hit saturated, filtered and slightly detuned from the last. It should sound sampled from a record rather than triggered from a kit.
- Ghost snaresQuiet hits scattered around the main backbeat at velocities under 52, doing what a shuffled hat would do in garage: filling the bar without weighting it.
- Vocal fragmentsHalf a syllable, pitched and reversed, used as texture rather than as a lyric. The words are meant to be almost but not quite recoverable.
- Reverb as the roomA six second hall on nearly everything, high-passed at 300Hz so the low end stays dry and the top end drowns.
How to get them
- DrumsSample individual hits from a garage record, run them through tape emulation with the wow set high, and bounce each one separately so they are all wrong in different ways.
- SnareSoft, low-passed at 5kHz, sent 40 percent wet to a six second hall. Keep the main hit around 104 so the ghosts underneath it stay in proportion.
- SubA sine with 80 milliseconds of portamento, moving in minor sevenths, ducked 3dB under the kick. It should feel like it is sliding rather than stepping.
- VocalChop a phrase to sixteenths, keep three slices, pitch two of them up a fourth, reverse one, and put all three through the same hall the drums use.
- Rim clickOn 2 and 4 at around 55, dry and centred. It is the only clean transient in the mix and it holds the pulse while everything else smears.
- Swing0.58, between garage's heavy shuffle and something straight. High enough that the e and the a lag, low enough that the half-time snare still reads as the anchor.
Reference points
Burial, Synkro, Sorrow, Blue Daisy, Vaults and Bwana, on Hyperdub, Apollo and Hotflush. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.