Nu Skool Breaks

What it is

The reaction to big beat's excess, from about 1998, mostly out of Brighton and London. Adam Freeland, Rennie Pilgrem and the TCR and Marine Parade circles kept the breakbeat and threw away the guitar samples, the shouting and the compression. What replaced them was space, a properly engineered sub bass borrowed from drum and bass, and a much more syncopated kick pattern. It ran alongside two-step garage and shared a lot of its rhythmic thinking, and it is the direct ancestor of what people later called bass music.

What it sounds like

Tight and dark. A short kick with a clean sub under it, a dry snare with a small room, and quite a lot of nothing in between. The bassline is a filtered saw or a Reese doing a two-bar figure at the front of the mix. Percussion is small and precise, panned wide. Where big beat filled every frequency at once, this leaves the midrange largely empty so the bass and the drums both have room.

Key elements

• Syncopated kickThe kick almost never lands on beat 3. It goes to the and of 2 or the a of 3 instead, which is the rhythmic signature that separates this from big beat immediately.
• Drum and bass subA mono sine below 100Hz doing the low end properly, borrowed wholesale from drum and bass engineering practice. It is what makes the genre sound modern next to its predecessor.
• Dry drumsSmall room reverbs at 0.3 seconds or less, and no bus compression to speak of. The dynamics are programmed rather than squashed in.
• Wide percussionShakers, cabasas and small metallic hits panned hard left and right at low level. They provide the movement that the sparse kick pattern gives up.

How to get them

• Write the kick against the snarePlace the snare on 2 and 4 first, then put the kicks where they are not expected: the and of 2, the a of 3, the last sixteenth of the bar. Avoid beat 3 entirely and the pattern immediately reads as breaks rather than as rock.
• Split the bassA mono sine below 110Hz for the sub, a separate filtered saw above it for the character. Automate the saw's filter and leave the sine alone.
• Small reverbsA room at 0.25 to 0.4 seconds on the snare and nothing on the kick. Any longer and the pattern's gaps fill in, which defeats the point of leaving them.
• Pan the percussionCabasa and shaker at 70 percent left and right, at about minus 20dB, high-passed above 2kHz. Keep everything below 200Hz dead centre.
• Leave the mids aloneA carved dip between 400Hz and 1kHz on the bass bus gives the snare somewhere to sit. This genre's mixes are noticeably scooped and it is deliberate.

Reference points

Adam Freeland, Rennie Pilgrem, Plump DJs, Stanton Warriors, Evil Nine, and TCR, Marine Parade and Finger Lickin' as labels. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.