Memphis Rap
A driving 808, a snare on three, and tape hiss doing half of the work.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
The 808 does the work: five hits in bar one, on 1, 2, the and of 2, the and of 3 and 4, which is a bassline written in the kick lane rather than a foundation under one. The snare appears once, on beat 3, and that is the entire backbeat. Hats are dead straight sixteenths at 78, 46, 62, 46, repeated without variation for fifteen beats, because the mechanical evenness against a 76 bpm drag is where the tension comes from. Bar two moves the fourth-beat kick to the e of 4 and adds one on the last sixteenth, puts a second snare on the final step, and lifts the last three hats into a roll before an open hat closes the loop. Swing stays at 50 percent: this was programmed on a machine by people who left it there.
What it is
Memphis in the early and middle nineties, made on four-track cassette decks and sold hand to hand on dubbed tapes. DJ Paul, Juicy J, Tommy Wright III, DJ Squeeky and Lord Infamous worked with an 808 or an SP-1200, a cheap sampler, and whatever horror soundtrack or slowed soul record was to hand. The tempo dropped into the seventies counted in half time, the snare moved to beat 3, and the tape generation loss became part of the aesthetic because nobody could afford to avoid it. It is the direct ancestor of crunk, of a good deal of modern trap, and of every phonk track made since 2017.
What it sounds like
Distorted, narrow and cold. The 808 kick is pushed hard enough to clip and it moves constantly, hitting five or six times a bar rather than anchoring the downbeat. Hi-hats run straight sixteenths with no swing at all, which at this tempo reads as double time. The snare is a thin, bright machine hit landing once a bar on 3. Above it: a detuned minor loop, a bell or a music-box figure, and a vocal chant buried under the drums. The whole mix is mono, hissy and clipped, and it should stay that way.
Key elements
- The snare on 3One backbeat per bar, on the third beat. Counted at double tempo it is an ordinary 2 and 4, but written at 76 bpm it produces the slow drag the whole style depends on.
- A moving 808The kick is a bassline. Five or six hits a bar, syncopated, with a long pitched tail carrying the root note. This is the idea trap inherited whole.
- Straight sixteenth hatsNo swing whatsoever. At this tempo a sixteenth grid ticks at 304 hits a minute, which supplies the urgency the tempo does not.
- Tape saturationEverything bounced through a cassette four-track, twice if possible. The hiss, the compressed top end and the wow are load bearing rather than incidental.
- The horror loopA short, detuned, minor-key sample from a soundtrack or an obscure soul record, pitched down and left slightly out of tune with itself.
How to get them
- 808One long sine with a pitch envelope dropping about an octave in 40 milliseconds, then clip it with a hard limiter until the top of the wave is flat. Tune the tail to the root of the loop or the whole track will sound wrong and you will blame the sample.
- SnareA thin electric snare, high-passed at 300Hz, with 15 milliseconds of reverse reverb in front of it if you want the classic tape smear. Keep it short and let it be the brightest thing in the mix.
- HatsStraight sixteenths, swing off, alternating 78 and 46 with the and of each beat at 62. Do not humanise them. The mechanical evenness against the dragging tempo is the tension.
- The loopPitch a sample down four to seven semitones without time correction, low-pass it at 7kHz, and detune a duplicate by 12 cents. Leave the tuning imperfect against the 808.
- TapeRun the whole mix through a cassette emulation at unity or a little hot, sum it to mono, and add hiss at about minus 40dB. Then do it again. Two generations is where the sound lives.
- SpaceKeep the arrangement to four elements: 808, snare, hats, loop. Memphis tapes are sparse because a four-track has four tracks, and the sparseness is why they hit hard.
Reference points
Three 6 Mafia, DJ Paul, Juicy J, Tommy Wright III, DJ Squeeky, Lord Infamous, Gangsta Pat and the wider Memphis tape underground, including its horrorcore end. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.