Glitchcore

What it is

In 2020 the word glitchcore was attached to a way of cutting video, all strobing frames and colour fringing, and the music that ended up tagged with it followed the same logic. Producers in and around the digicore Discord servers, Jane Remover among the more careful of them, were already chopping their own finished bars into thirty-second-note stutters and pitching the results up until the vocals sounded like a different person. What comes out keeps hyperpop's sounds and throws away its verse. A phrase plays once, plays again with three sixteenths repeated four times, then cuts to nothing. The editing habits are much closer to breakcore than to anything in a club, and the tempo is set for headphones and a phone speaker rather than a room.

What it sounds like

Compressed to death and pitched up. Vocals sit five or six semitones above where they were sung. Kicks and 808s are clipped square. Snares are thin, bright and layered with white noise so they survive being repeated eight times in a beat. Risers, reverse cymbals and buffer-repeat artefacts are used as edit markers rather than as transitions, so they arrive and stop within a beat. There is a lot of digital silence, cut hard on a sample boundary with no fade, which produces its own click and the click is kept. Melodic material is usually a bright bell or a guitar loop, and it tends to be the one element left intact.

Key elements

• The stutterOne or two sixteenths repeated three and four times with the velocity climbing. It is the genre's basic unit, and it appears in the kick, the snare and the vocal equally.
• Bar two as a corrupted bar oneThe second bar is the first bar run through the edit rather than a second idea. That relationship is audible and it is what separates this from ordinary fast pop.
• Hard cuts to nothingTwo sixteenths of complete silence in the loop below, longer in a real arrangement, cut on a sample boundary. There is no fade and no reverb tail, and the abruptness is the effect.
• Nightcore pitchEverything shifted up together, tempo and pitch locked, so the whole track sounds like a tape running fast rather than like individual pitched parts.
• Clipping as textureThe distortion is not hidden or apologised for. Drums square off, the 808 buzzes, and that buzz is treated as a sound rather than as a mistake to fix.

How to get them

• Bounce first, then destroyWrite eight bars that work as a normal fast pop track, print them to audio, and edit the audio. Trying to program the chaos into a piano roll from the start gives you noise with no original for it to be a corruption of.
• Beat repeat at thirty-secondsRun a beat repeat with the grid set to a thirty-second and the chance around 20 percent, record the output, and then keep the four moments you liked and delete the rest. Live randomisation is a generator, not a take.
• Pitch up and leave the formantsShift the whole bounce up five semitones with formant correction off, or just play the file back faster. The tempo change is part of it and correcting for it defeats the point.
• Snare rollsRepitch each repeat in a roll up a semitone from the last. Eight identical snare samples in a beat phase into a single buzz, and the rising pitch is what keeps them reading as separate hits.
• Cut without crossfadesSwitch off automatic fades on your clips. The click at a bad edit point is a sound this genre wants, and every DAW is trying to remove it for you.
• Write the silence inLeave two sixteenths of nothing at the end of a bar and do not put a reverse cymbal in the hole. At this tempo two sixteenths is about 175 milliseconds, which registers as a dropout rather than as a rest.

Reference points

Jane Remover, quannnic, funeral, Twikipedia and the wider digicore and hyperpop edit scene, plus Venetian Snares and the breakcore editing tradition it borrows from. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.