Mahraganat

What it is

Salam City and El Marg, on the north eastern edge of Cairo, around 2007. A wedding in those neighbourhoods happens in the street, and the DJ sets up on a flatbed with a rig loud enough to reach the top floor. Somebody started building the backing tracks in FruityLoops instead of hiring a band, somebody else put a cheap autotune on the MC, and inside five years the results were the most listened to music in Egypt and formally barred from performing by the musicians' syndicate. The word is the plural of mahragan, festival. The rhythm is maqsoum, the same rhythm the tabla players were already using, moved onto a drum machine and hit a great deal harder. Oka Wi Ortega, Sadat, Alaa Fifty and Hamo Bika are the names that carried it out of those streets.

What it sounds like

Bright, clipped and enormous. The kick is a sampled dum driven into distortion, the clap is a stack of machine samples with a short room on it, and the hats tick on every offbeat sixteenth. A sampled tabla rolls across the turnaround. The melody is a synth lead, usually a saw or a plucked preset, playing a maqam-flavoured line that never leaves where it started, and often a sampled mizmar, the double reed horn from weddings, honking over the chorus. The vocal is autotuned until it is an instrument, several MCs trading lines, and it sits louder than anything else. Mixes are made on headphones and tested on a street rig, so the low mids are huge and there is very little below 50Hz.

Key elements

• Maqsoum on a machineDum on beat 1 and beat 3, tek on the and of 1, the and of 2 and beat 4, plus a machine kick on the and of 4 that no tabla player would have put there.
• The clap on the and of 1The backbeat is not 2 and 4. Claps land on the and of 1, the and of 2 and beat 4, which are the tek strokes of maqsoum, and it is the strangest thing about the pattern to an ear raised on house.
• Hats on the offbeat sixteenthsThe e and the a of every beat at 46 and 58, with one step a bar given up to an open hat. Nothing lands on a beat in that lane at all.
• The tabla rollA sampled tabla, four strokes in bar one and seven in bar two, the last three of them a rising roll across the end of the loop where a band would have played a fill.
• Autotune as an instrumentRetune speed at zero, scale set to the maqam, several MCs stacked. The artefact is the sound rather than a mistake to be hidden, and the records that hide it are worse.

How to get them

• Sequence maqsoumDum on 1 and 3, tek on the and of 1, the and of 2 and beat 4. Put the dums in the kick lane and the teks in the clap lane and the rhythm reads correctly even with machine sounds on it.
• KickA sampled tabla dum layered under a synthesised kick, then driven into a clipper until the low mids fill in. There is almost nothing below 50Hz in these records because a street rig cannot reproduce it.
• ClapThree machine clap samples stacked with about 12 milliseconds of room reverb, hard on the tek positions. It has to be the loudest percussive event in the bar.
• Autotune openlyRetune speed at zero and the scale set to the maqam you are writing in. Hiding the artefact produces a worse record and a less honest one.
• MizmarA sampled double reed horn over the chorus, or a saw lead with a fast vibrato standing in for one. It is the wedding instrument, and it is what ties the record to the street it gets played in.
• StraightSwing 0.5. Maqsoum on a machine is flat by definition, and the lean you might be reaching for belongs on the tabla lane as a played roll instead.

Reference points

Oka Wi Ortega, Sadat, Alaa Fifty, Figo, Hamo Bika, Islam Chipsy on the instrumental side, and the street wedding DJs in Salam City and El Marg who built the sound. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.