Glitch Hop

What it is

Take a funk break, warp it until every hit sits on the grid, then move a fifth of those hits one sixteenth off it on purpose. That is the method, and glitch hop is what a generation raised on both Amen breaks and Dilla did with it once laptops were quick enough to chop in real time. The tempo settles around 110, half of drum and bass, slow enough that every drum hit is individually audible and every edit is meant to be heard. Koan Sound, Opiuo, Ott and the Addictech and Gravitas catalogues gave it a shape: a heavy swung backbeat, talkbox and vocoder work in the mid-range, and a bass that stutters through a gate. It has more funk in it than anything else on this page, which is why the backbeat comes back.

What it sounds like

Busy and funky and very deliberately artificial. Drums are layered acoustic and electronic hits with audible edit points, stutters and reversed tails. The bass is a filtered saw or a wobbling square gated into sixteenths, often with a talkbox or a formant filter over it so it speaks. Guitars, clavinets and Rhodes chords come in through a sampler, chopped and re-pitched. Everything is processed with granular effects, bit crushers and short delays, and there is usually one moment per eight bars where the whole track stutters and comes back a beat late.

Key elements

• The backbeat returnsSnare on 2 and 4 at 110 with ghost hits either side of it, which is a funk drummer's backbeat rather than a half-time one, and it changes how everything above it is written.
• Audible editsStutters, reverses and one-sixteenth displacements left in the open. If you cannot hear where the knife went in, the point has been missed.
• Talkbox bassA formant or vocoder filter over a saw bass so it forms vowel shapes. It sits at 300Hz to 2kHz, well above the sub, and it carries the hook.
• Ghost notesSnare hits at 40 to 52 either side of the backbeat, taken from funk drumming and kept when the rest of the kit went digital.
• Chopped instrumentsClavinet, guitar and Rhodes phrases sliced to sixteenths and re-triggered out of order, so the harmony arrives in the wrong sequence and still works.

How to get them

• BreakWarp a funk break to 110, slice it at every transient, then move two or three slices a sixteenth late and reverse one. Bounce the result and treat it as a new sample.
• BassA saw through a low-pass at 700Hz, gated to sixteenths from a separate MIDI track, then a formant filter with the vowel on an LFO at a quarter note.
• SnareAn acoustic snare layered with a clap, compressed at 6 to 1 with a slow attack so the ghosts come up. Ghosts at 40 to 52, main hits at 110 and above.
• StutterOnce per eight bars, repeat the last sixteenth of a bar four times with the pitch rising and a high-pass opening across the repeats.
• MaracasOn the e of 1, the a of 2, the e of 3 and the a of 4 at around 50, panned wide, so the swing is legible even under a busy drum part.
• Swing0.56, which is roughly where a warped funk break lands once you stop fighting it. Match the bass gate to the same setting or the two will argue.

Reference points

Koan Sound, Opiuo, Ott, Edit, Beats Antique and Tipper, on Addictech, Gravitas and Alpha Pup. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.