New Jack Swing

What it is

Harlem, 1987. Teddy Riley was nineteen, had an SP-1200 and a room full of church singers, and worked out that if you shuffled the sixteenths on a drum machine hard enough the machine started to sound like a go-go band. Guy's first album, Keith Sweat's Make It Last Forever and Bobby Brown's Don't Be Cruel came out inside eighteen months of each other and the sound went from a Harlem studio to the top of the pop chart. Barry Michael Cooper named it in a Village Voice piece. What made it work is the collision: gospel voice leading and doo-wop stacks over programming that was harder and drier than anything R&B had used before. Every later producer who put a rap verse on a soul record was working from this template, and the drum machines that sold in the nineties sold on the strength of a swing parameter this genre made mandatory.

What it sounds like

Big, dry and bright. The snare is a gated eighties crack with a short reverb slammed shut after about 120 milliseconds, sitting louder than anything except the lead vocal. The kick is short and punchy with no sub under it, usually an 808 or a LinnDrum body layered with a sampled acoustic thud. Hats are closed and metallic and are the part the swing acts on most audibly. Above that, stacked vocal harmony four and five parts deep, a DX7 electric piano, orchestra hits, and a synth bass that plays a slap-derived line with the notes clipped short. Everything is chorused and everything is loud.

Key elements

• The swing settingThe SP-1200 and the MPC had a shuffle parameter, and this genre lives at 60 to 66 percent. Nothing else about the programming would sound like this if the sixteenths were straight.
• Go-go inheritanceThe kick figure comes from the Washington pocket beat, syncopated across the a of 1 and the a of 3 rather than marking the quarters. The congas that go with it in go-go have been removed.
• The gated snareA short bright crack with a reverb tail cut off by a noise gate, mixed absurdly loud. It carries the backbeat alone, so there is nothing subtle happening on 2 and 4.
• Stacked gospel harmonyFour or five vocal parts, all sung by the same one or two people, moving in parallel with passing fourths and suspended chords straight out of church.
• Clipped synth bassShort notes with a fast decay, doubling the kick rhythm rather than the root motion, so the low end reads as percussion for most of the bar.

How to get them

• Set the shuffle before anything elsePut sixteenth swing at 62 to 64 percent and program on top of it, not underneath. Adding swing to a part written straight lands the accents in different places from where they were composed.
• Build the kick from go-goHits on 1, the a of 1, beat 3, the a of 3 and the and of 4. Keep it short, high-pass at 45Hz and do not put a sub layer under it; the weight comes from the level, not the frequency.
• Gate the snareSend a bright snare to a plate of about 1.4 seconds, gate the return with a 120 millisecond hold and zero release, and print it. Then mix it three decibels louder than you think you should.
• Stack the vocals five deepOne lead, two doubles panned hard, and a third and fifth above, all sung by the same voice. Tune them almost but not quite, and slide into the notes rather than starting on them.
• Add the stutter turnaroundEvery second bar, put three snare hits across beat 4 at descending velocity, then start the next phrase on a downbeat with nothing under it but the kick. That figure is the genre's punctuation mark.
• Keep the tempo honest112 to 118. Faster and the shuffle turns into a jump blues; slower and the gated snare starts to sound like a power ballad from the same year.

Reference points

Guy, Bobby Brown, Keith Sweat, Bell Biv DeVoe, Wreckx-n-Effect, Jodeci, Today and Al B. Sure!, plus Teddy Riley's and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis's production catalogues. Reference points for the sound, not endorsements.