Happy Hardcore

What it is

In 1994 British rave split in two. One half took the breakbeat down to 160 and got darker, and became jungle. The other half kept the four to the floor kick, put the piano back, pitched the vocal up until it sounded like a cartoon, and got relentlessly cheerful. Scott Brown in Glasgow, Slipmatt and Force and Styles in England, Hixxy and the Bonkers compilations. The kick is as distorted as anything in Rotterdam, and that is the joke people miss: this is hardcore played in a major key with the break left in, not a soft version of it.

What it sounds like

A hard kick under a chopped break that supplies the snare and the shuffle, an open hi-hat on every offbeat so the loop bounces rather than marches, a piano riff in a bright major key, and a female vocal sped up by three or four semitones. Big bright reverb on everything. The bass is a simple rubbery offbeat line rather than a sub. Under the cheerfulness the drums are doing something quite intricate, and that is most of why the records still work.

Key elements

• Open hat on every offbeatFour open hats a bar, one on each and, at close to snare level. It is the bounce, and it is the single most reliable way to tell this from any other hardcore.
• Break ghostsQuiet snare hits at velocities in the thirties and forties, left in from the chopped break. They give the loop a shuffle the kick alone cannot produce.
• The piano riffEight bars of major key piano, played in octaves, with a lot of reverb and no dynamics. Usually the most memorable thing in the track by a wide margin.
• Pitched-up vocalA soul or house vocal sped up three to five semitones. The formant shift is the sound, not a compromise, and time-stretching to preserve the voice destroys it.
• Rubber bassA short filtered saw on the offbeat eighths, an octave above where a sub would sit. It bounces against the open hats rather than reinforcing the kick.

How to get them

• Kick909 kick, overdriven and low-passed at 400Hz like any hardcore kick, but shorten the decay to about 250ms so the break underneath stays audible. Tune it to the root of the piano riff.
• Chop the breakSlice a Think break at sixteenths, high-pass at 200Hz, and lay the slices so the loud snares land on 2 and 4 and the quiet ones fall wherever they want. Do not quantise the ghosts hard.
• Open hats909 open hat, decay about a sixteenth and a half so it is cut off by the next kick, sitting around 90 to 96. Anything shorter and the bounce disappears entirely.
• PianoA bright sampled grand, played in octaves in the right hand only, with a 2.5 second hall at forty percent wet. Compress it hard so the reverb tail is as loud as the notes.
• VocalResample rather than stretch. Load the vocal at its original pitch, play it four semitones up on a keyboard, and print the result. A twelve-bit sampler mode helps if you have one.
• Keep it in majorWrite the riff first, in a major key, and build the kick to fit it. Starting from the drums produces something that sounds like hardcore with a piano bolted on, which is the common failure.

Reference points

Scott Brown, Hixxy, Force and Styles, Dougal, Slipmatt, Sy and Unknown, and the Bonkers series, Happy Hardcore Records and Blatant Beats. Named as reference points, not endorsements.