Neurofunk
Techstep put through a lab: clinical, tight and sanded smooth.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
True tempo, 174, two bars. Set it next to the drum and bass entry on this site and the difference is visible: there is almost no ghost snare work at all, and the kick lane carries the syncopation instead. Bar one has the signature double kick on the e and the and of beat 3, the quieter hit first. The hats sit only on the e and the a of every beat, never on the beat itself, with exactly two velocity levels. Bar two moves one kick up to the e of 2, adds a late kick on the and of 4, and puts a single quiet snare on the e of beat 4 as the only ghost in sixty-four steps.
What it is
What techstep turned into once producers stopped sampling breaks entirely and started building drums from single hits. Ed Rush and Optical's Wormhole in 1998 is usually named as the pivot. The pattern gets tighter, the ghost notes disappear, the reverb comes off, and everything that made drum and bass sound like a sampled record is engineered out. What replaces it is bass design: the sound moving, morphing and stepping in ways that would be impossible with a sampler, which is where the genre's attention actually goes.
What it sounds like
Dry, precise and metallic. Drums with almost no room on them, a snare that is a single hard crack, and hats programmed in exact offbeat sixteenths like a sequencer readout. The bass is the event: a growl that changes shape three times in a bar, full of formant sweeps and comb filtering and hard sync. There is very little sustain anywhere, which is why neurofunk sounds so much smaller on laptop speakers than it does on a rig.
Key elements
- The double kickTwo kicks in quick succession before the second snare, usually on the e and the and of beat 3. It is the rhythmic fingerprint of the genre and it replaces the break's ghost notes.
- No ghost notesDeliberately. Where jungle fills the gaps with quiet snares, neurofunk leaves them for the bass to move through, which is why the bass reads as a rhythmic part.
- Offbeat sixteenth hatsHats on the e and the a, never on the beat. Machine-exact, with only two velocity levels. It sounds like a sequencer because it is meant to.
- Morphing bassThe bass note changes timbre mid-note, several times a bar, in sync with the drums. Automation and modulation doing the job that a melody does elsewhere.
- Dry drumsAlmost no reverb. The space in a neurofunk mix comes from stereo width and from the bass moving, not from a room.
How to get them
- SnareOne layer for the crack around 1.8kHz, one for the body around 220Hz, transient-shaped to a hard attack and a decay under 200ms. Any tail longer than that starts to sound like techstep.
- Double kick timingPut the two kicks a sixteenth apart, not a thirty-second, and make the first quieter than the second by about 25 velocity. Equal-velocity double kicks sound like a mistake rather than a figure.
- Bass movementDraw automation on filter cutoff, formant and distortion drive in sixteenth-note steps rather than smooth curves. Stepped modulation is what makes the bass read as part of the drum pattern.
- Resample everythingBounce the bass to audio, then edit and re-process the audio. Every producer in this genre works this way, because the interesting sounds come from destroying a rendered file rather than from a patch.
- Mid-side the drumsKeep kick and snare mono to 200Hz and push the hats and top percussion wide. The width is the only spatial cue in the mix once the reverb is gone.
Reference points
Ed Rush and Optical, Noisia, Phace, Mefjus, Black Sun Empire, Emperor, and Virus, Neosignal and Critical as labels. 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.