Rage

What it is

Playboi Carti released Whole Lotta Red on Christmas Day 2020 and split its audience straight down the middle, and the production style on it hardened into a genre within about a year. F1lthy and the Working on Dying circle, plus Outtatown and Star Boy, had been building beats around one sound: a detuned, distorted synth lead pushed so hard it behaves like a guitar. Ken Carson and Destroy Lonely on Opium carried it forward. The drums exist to stay out of the way. There is a clap on beat 3, an 808 driven into clipping, and hats so quiet through the first three beats that they barely register, and that restraint is a deliberate production choice rather than laziness.

What it sounds like

A single lead defines it: a supersaw or a hard pluck, detuned 15 to 25 cents, run through distortion and a bitcrusher until the top end fizzes. It plays two or three notes and holds them. The 808 is overdriven past the point where it has a fundamental, so it reads as a square wave with a punch on the front. The clap is thin and dry. Hats are quiet, small and used sparingly. Vocals are mixed loud, often screamed rather than rapped, with the autotune fighting the delivery. There is no reverb worth mentioning and no space in the mix, and everything hits the limiter at once by design.

Key elements

• The lead is the beatThe rhythmic identity is in the synth part, not the drums. A rage instrumental with the lead muted sounds like an unfinished trap beat, and that is the correct diagnosis.
• A clipping 808Distorted until the sine turns square, so it occupies the midrange as well as the bottom. It is doing the job a bass guitar does in rock music.
• One clap, on beat 3Halftime, a single backbeat per bar, thin and short. Adding a second on beat 1 turns the track into ordinary trap immediately.
• Hats that arrive lateNothing or almost nothing in the first half of the bar, then a run climbing into the barline. The absence at the start is what gives the lead room to be enormous.
• Nothing else at allNo pad, no counter melody, no percussion layer. Four elements and a vocal is a finished rage beat, and the discipline of stopping there is most of the skill.

How to get them

• LeadThree saw voices detuned 20 cents apart, through a distortion unit driven hard, then a bitcrusher at about 10 bits, then a low-pass at 6kHz to tame what the crusher did. Play two notes and let them ring for a bar each.
• 808A sine with a 1.5 second decay through a waveshaper driven until the meter reads 8dB of gain reduction, then parallel it back with the clean sine at minus 6dB so the punch survives. Tune it to the lead.
• Hold the hats backLeave the first two beats of the bar with one or two quiet hats at most, then run four climbing into the barline. Filling the bar with sixteenths removes the only dynamic the arrangement has.
• ClapOne layered clap, high-passed at 500Hz, decay under 180 milliseconds, on beat 3 only. No reverb, no tail, and a ghost at about a third of the velocity on the and of 3 if the bar needs an answer.
• Mix into the ceilingBus the lead, the 808 and the drums together and clip the bus. These records are loud in a specific way that comes from everything distorting at the same instant rather than from a mastering chain.
• Resist addingWhen the beat feels empty, make the lead louder rather than adding a part. Nearly every failed attempt at this style fails by filling the gaps that the style is made of.

Reference points

Playboi Carti, Ken Carson and Destroy Lonely on Opium, with F1lthy, Outtatown, Star Boy and the Working on Dying producers who built the sound. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.