Gabber

What it is

Parkzicht in Rotterdam ran a night that wanted the hardest records in the building, and Amsterdam would not supply them, so the city made its own. What came out between 1992 and 1995 is the most stripped music in this catalogue. A 909 bass drum was overdriven until its body turned into a pitched square wave, tuned, and put on every beat at 180 to 200. Then almost everything else was removed. No hi-hats, no groove, no percussion. A shouted sample, a hoover, a clap where a clap was needed, and six minutes of that kick. The word is Amsterdam dialect for a mate, and it started as an insult aimed at the crowd.

What it sounds like

One sound, mostly. The kick has a click on the front, a body that is audibly a tone rather than a thud, and a tail that decays over about two thirds of a beat, so the low end pulses instead of pumping. Because it is tuned, a run of kicks makes a bassline by itself. Above it there is a great deal of empty spectrum, which is why gabber records sound loud rather than dense. A crash marks a phrase, a shout marks a drop, and the hoover arrives about halfway through.

Key elements

• The kick is the whole arrangementBass, drum and lead in one sound. When the kick changes pitch the track changes chord, and that is as much harmonic movement as most gabber records get.
• No hi-hatsThe grid below has no closed or open hat lane, because most Rotterdam records of this period had none. The kick tail occupies the space a hat would use.
• Doubled kicksTwo kicks an eighth apart at the end of a phrase. With no other percussion in the track, this is the entire vocabulary of rhythmic variation.
• The shoutA sampled voice, pitched down and drenched in a short reverb, dropped once every sixteen bars. It marks the arrangement, doing the job an intro or a chorus would do.
• Tuned to the trackBecause the kick is a tone, it has to agree with the hoover. Producers tuned kicks by ear to the root, which is why gabber sits in a small number of keys.

How to get them

• Make the kick909 bass drum, decay to maximum. Overdrive it by twelve to eighteen decibels into a hard clipper. Then low-pass around 350Hz, which removes the fizz and leaves a pitched square. That low-pass is the step most people skip and it is the whole sound.
• Add the pitch envelopeSweep the pitch down about an octave over the first 60ms, then hold. The fast part is the click, the held part is the note. Retune the held part to the key of the track.
• Split the kick in twoLayer a short punchy transient on top of the long distorted body, on separate channels, and compress only the body. Doing it as one sample means the click distorts into mush.
• Leave the mix emptyNothing between 400Hz and 3kHz except the sample. Gabber sounds enormous because there is nowhere for the ear to go except the kick, and filling that band undoes it.
• Clap sparinglyOne clap a bar, on beat 3 rather than on 2 and 4. A full backbeat makes this read as hard house, which it is not.
• Write at 190 and test at 200Rotterdam records drifted upward through the mid nineties and DJs pitched them further. Check that your kick still reads as a note when it is sped up four percent.

Reference points

Rotterdam Termination Source, Euromasters, Paul Elstak, Neophyte, DJ Dano, and the Rotterdam Records, Terror Traxx and Mokum labels. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.