Glitch
Digital failure treated as a drum kit, at very low volume.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
Two bars at 112, true tempo. The velocity spread is the pattern here: the loudest hit is 104 and the quietest is 26, and if you flatten that range you get a plain electro beat. The kick holds beat 1 and adds one soft hit on the and of 3; bar two adds two more that are barely there at 44 and 58. The click backbeat is on 2 and 4 but bar one follows the beat 4 hit with two decaying satellites at 38 and 28, which is the CD-skip figure. The hats are a sixteenth pattern with most of it deleted rather than a groove, and the clave lands on steps nothing else uses. Real glitch also edits below the sixteenth; the shortest hits here would in practice be doubled and tripled at the sample level.
What it is
Music built from the sounds computers make when something goes wrong: buffer underruns, CD skips, quantisation error, the click at a bad edit point. Oval made albums from damaged CDs from 1993, and by the end of the decade the clicks and cuts scene around Mille Plateaux had turned the idea into a genre with its own conventions. The related microsound work of Alva Noto and Ryoji Ikeda pushed it further towards silence. The reason it belongs with breaks is that the hits are being placed by hand, one at a time, in the same spirit as a jungle edit and with none of the volume.
What it sounds like
Tiny. Clicks, pops, short bursts of filtered noise and fragments of sine tone, most of them lasting a few milliseconds. The dynamic range is enormous compared to anything else on this site, and a lot of the material sits near the noise floor. Where there is bass it is a soft sine that fades in over a bar. Reverb is used sparingly and usually convolved from something odd. It rewards headphones and disappears entirely in a car.
Key elements
- Micro-hitsSounds of 5 to 40 milliseconds. They have no body to speak of, so pitch and placement are the only expressive tools available.
- Dropouts as rhythmBeats where a hit is expected and does not arrive. The absence is a rhythmic event, which only works because the pattern is sparse enough for the ear to be tracking it.
- A rim or click backbeatSomething on 2 and 4, but tiny. Keeping a conventional backbeat under unconventional material is what gives glitch a shape at all.
- Extreme dynamicsHits at velocity 26 next to hits at velocity 104 in the same bar. Flatten that range and the whole aesthetic collapses into a beatbox pattern.
How to get them
- Make your own hitsRecord something into your DAW, zoom to sample level, and cut out fragments of a few milliseconds from the transients and the edit points. That is where the click library comes from, not from a pack.
- Bit reduction and buffer abuseReduce a sustained tone to 4 bits, or run a granular delay with the buffer set to a few milliseconds and the feedback high. Both produce material that sounds like something broken rather than something designed.
- Pitch the clicksA click has no obvious pitch until you put three of them at different transpositions in a row. Repitching by fifths and octaves gives a sequence of clicks an audible melodic shape.
- Mix quietlyPeak around minus 12dB and do not limit the master. The genre's whole effect depends on the listener turning it up, and on the quiet material staying quiet when they do.
- Leave the errors inIf a plugin produces a click when you automate it too fast, keep the click. Most of the vocabulary here came from people noticing an artefact and deciding not to fix it.
Reference points
Oval, Pole, Alva Noto, Ryoji Ikeda, Vladislav Delay, Fennesz, and Mille Plateaux, Raster-Noton and ~scape as labels. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.