Gqom

What it is

Durban, around 2011, and a generation of teenagers working in cracked copies of FL Studio with no particular loyalty to the four to the floor kick that Johannesburg had been running for twenty years. What they built moves in threes. The kick lands on every third sixteenth, so it crosses the barline instead of confirming it, and the ear spends the whole loop waiting for a downbeat the drums decline to supply. Rudeboyz, Citizen Boy, DJ Lag and Naked Boys were passing these around on WhatsApp and taxi rank CDs for years before anyone outside South Africa had a word for it. The word itself is Zulu, roughly a hit or a bang, and it describes the low tom better than it describes anything else on the record.

What it sounds like

Dark, dry and stuck in the midrange. Low toms tuned near the root do most of the melodic work, the kick has far more body than click, and a shaker hisses through the sixteenths the kick is not using. Hi-hats barely feature; where a house record puts an offbeat hat, gqom puts a hole. Over the top there is usually a whistle, a vocal chant looped without any pitch correction, and a synth stab that never needs more than one note. Reverb is short and applied to the toms rather than to everything, so the whole thing sounds like a small room played very loud.

Key elements

• A kick that counts in threesEvery third sixteenth, so five kicks land against four beats and the cycle only resolves when the loop comes round. That mismatch is the genre.
• Low toms as the melodyTuned toms carrying the tune where a synth would carry it elsewhere. They are pitched, they are loud, and they answer the kick rather than doubling it.
• Hi-hats withheldA quiet closed hat on the and of each beat, one extra in bar two, and no offbeat ride. Where a house record would put a ringing hat, gqom leaves the step dry.
• A clap that only turns the barNo backbeat. A clap appears on beat 4 to mark the end of the bar, then a short roll at the end of bar two to push into the next loop.
• The shaker hissA shaker on every sixteenth between the beats, quiet enough that it reads as air rather than as a part anybody would name.

How to get them

• Program the kick firstPlace a hit, move three sixteenths, place another, and keep going. Do not correct the one that lands awkwardly near the barline, because that is the hit doing the work.
• Tune the tomsTwo or three low toms a fourth apart, decay around 400 milliseconds, high-passed at 60Hz so they do not fight the kick. Write a figure, not a fill.
• Keep it straightSwing at 0.5. Any shuffle at all rounds the three-against-four off and the pattern collapses into an ordinary broken beat.
• Leave the hats outWhatever hi-hat you have written, delete half of it and drop the rest to under velocity 60. Gqom is a genre about holes and a busy hat fills them.
• Chant and whistleOne vocal phrase, chopped, no tuning, no reverb tail. A whistle sample on the turnaround. Both should sound like they were recorded on a phone, because they usually were.
• Mix it narrowKick and toms dead centre, shaker barely wide, and no bass synth under the kick at all. The low tom is the bassline, so keep everything else out of that range.

Reference points

Rudeboyz, DJ Lag, Citizen Boy, Griffit Vigo, Naked Boys, Distruction Boyz, and the Gqom Oh! and Goon Club Allstars compilations that carried it abroad. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.