Halftime

What it is

Ivy Lab, Alix Perez and the 1985 Music and 20/20 LDN catalogues took the obvious step and made it work: keep drum and bass at 170 to 174, keep its production standards and its bass design, and put the snare on beat 3 instead of on 2 and 4. Halftime is the result, and it has been the most interesting corner of that world for about a decade. Because the backbeat only arrives once a bar, the space between hits is enormous at this tempo, and the style fills it with ghost notes, rides, rattles and the textural detail jungle producers used to spend on breaks. It sits closer in spirit to instrumental hip hop than to a rave, and it gets played in neurofunk sets regardless.

What it sounds like

Expensive and dark. The bass is designed rather than played: layered sines, granular textures and resampled growls, with the sub kept short and the mid-range full of movement. Drums are meticulous, every ghost note audible, sampled from real kits as often as from machines. Jazz and soul harmony turns up in the pads, seventh and eleventh voicings on a Rhodes or a filtered sample, and there is usually a vocal fragment treated until it is texture. Reverbs are small and dark, the stereo image is wide in the mid-range and mono at the bottom, and nothing is louder than it needs to be.

Key elements

• 170 with a snare on 3The whole proposition. Drum and bass tempo, hip hop weight, and a bar that takes twice as long to resolve as the tempo suggests.
• Ghost notes everywhereSnare hits at 38 to 50 filling the space the missing backbeat left. They are what makes the pattern read as played rather than as sparse.
• The rideA ride cymbal marking the four beats flat while everything else moves around it. It is the part that tells the ear where the bar is.
• Designed bassResampled and layered rather than synthesised in one pass: a sub sine, a mid growl and a granular texture bounced together and processed as one sound.
• Jazz harmonySevenths, ninths and elevenths on a Rhodes or a filtered sample, usually two chords, sitting above 400Hz and well out of the way of the bass.

How to get them

• DrumsBuild the kit from individual sampled hits, not a loop, and program the ghosts at 38 to 50 before you touch the main hits. The ghosts are the arrangement.
• RideA dark ride on all four beats at 70 and 52 alternating, low-passed at 9kHz and pushed back with a 0.4 second dark room so it sits behind the hats.
• BassLayer a mono sine below 70Hz, a distorted mid growl above 200Hz and a granular texture on top, then bounce all three and process the result as one instrument.
• SnareSampled acoustic snare, tuned to the key, with a short dark room. One loud hit per bar at 116, one answering hit late in the second bar, and every ghost well under half that velocity.
• KeysTwo chords with sevenths and elevenths, played once every two bars on a Rhodes, high-passed at 400Hz and lightly ducked against the bass.
• Swing50 percent. The ghost notes provide all the looseness this needs, and at 172 a swung sixteenth is too small an interval to read as anything but sloppy.

Reference points

Ivy Lab, Alix Perez, Sam Binga, Fixate, Homemade Weapons and Halogenix, on 1985 Music, Critical and 20/20 LDN. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.