Ghetto House
Chicago again, faster and ruder, with the kick doing the talking.
The pattern
1 bar, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
One bar, because a ghetto house loop genuinely is one bar and the variation happens live on the mixer. The kick carries everything: all four beats between 118 and 122, plus sixteenths on the a of 1 and the a of 3 at 100 and one on the and of 4 at 96. That is the trip. Clap on 2 and 4 at 114, a closed hat on the offbeat eighths at 80 with a sixteenth ghost at 34 in front of it, and a single open hat on the and of 4. No percussion lane, because there is nowhere left in the bar to put one.
What it is
Chicago in the early nineties, made cheaply and fast for Dance Mania by DJ Funk, DJ Deeon and Paul Johnson. The tempo climbs into the middle 140s, the arrangement strips back to a kick, a clap and a vocal loop that is usually explicit, and the interesting material moves into the kick lane: extra sixteenth kicks between the beats that turn four to the floor into something that trips over itself. It is the direct ancestor of juke and footwork, which took the same kick programming and doubled the tempo again.
What it sounds like
Loud, dry, and almost empty. An 808 or 909 kick with sixteenths pushed in between the beats, a hard clap, one hat on the offbeat, and a chanted vocal repeating over the top. There is rarely a chord anywhere. Records were cut in an afternoon and pressed with the levels hot, so everything distorts slightly, and that distortion is now part of what people are copying when they copy the genre.
Key elements
- Kick with sixteenths in itExtra kicks on the a of 1 and the a of 3, plus one on the and of 4. That is the entire rhythmic idea and it needs nothing else around it.
- A hard clap808 or 909 clap on 2 and 4, loud, dry, and clipped enough that you can hear the limiter working on it.
- Almost no hatsOne offbeat closed hat and a sixteenth ghost in front of it. Anything more fills the space the kick pattern is using.
- A chanted vocal loopTwo or four bars of a phrase, sampled and repeated for six minutes. It is the hook and there is not going to be another one.
- TempoBetween 140 and 150. Below that the kick pattern stops reading as urgent and the whole thing turns back into ordinary house.
How to get them
- KickOne 808 kick sample, tuned high enough that consecutive sixteenths do not smear into each other. Shorten the decay until each hit is clearly a separate event.
- Kick programmingPut the extra hits on the a of 1 and the a of 3 at around velocity 100, under the on-beat hits at 120. That difference in level is what makes the pattern trip rather than gallop.
- ClapClip it. Run the clap into a hard limiter with the ceiling set low so it distorts audibly, then leave it dry and centred.
- VocalSample two bars, pitch it down a couple of semitones, and loop it with no processing beyond a high-pass. Sweetening it is the wrong instinct here.
- Mix it hotPush the master into a limiter until you can hear it working. These records were never clean, and cleaning them up removes most of what makes them the genre.
Reference points
DJ Funk, DJ Deeon, Paul Johnson, DJ Slugo, and the Dance Mania catalogue. 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.