Rhythmic Noise

What it is

One kick drum, a distortion unit and a band-pass filter is genuinely the whole recipe. Ant-Zen in Bavaria and Hands in Berlin built a catalogue out of it through the mid nineties, and Converter, Winterkaelte, Imminent and Somatic Responses all arrived at the same method independently. Take a single percussive hit. Overdrive it until it is mostly harmonics and no body. Repeat it on every sixteenth, then automate a filter across the run so the repetition stops sounding like repetition. There is no snare, no backbeat and usually no melody, and the arrangement consists of holes being punched in the kick pattern. Powernoise is the other name for it, and the two words describe the same argument.

What it sounds like

Abrasive across the whole spectrum at once. The kick has been clipped so hard that it has no transient left, so what you hear is a square-ish burst of energy with a resonant peak somewhere between 200Hz and 2kHz that moves. Nothing has decay. There is no bassline, because the low end of the kick is the bassline, and no chords, because the filter resonance supplies the pitch. Occasional bursts of white noise stand in for a snare without ever landing on 2 or 4. Reverb, when it appears at all, is a short metallic room used to smear one hit into the next rather than to create space.

Key elements

• The sixteenth kickOne hit on every sixteenth, shaped entirely by velocity: hard on the beats, medium on the ands, quiet everywhere else. The shape is the groove.
• No backbeatBeats 2 and 4 carry the kick and nothing else. Adding a snare there turns this into hardcore in a single move, and nobody in the genre does it.
• Filter automationA resonant band-pass swept across the kick bus over eight or sixteen bars. It is the melody, the arrangement and the tension all at once.
• Holes as arrangementVariation comes from removing hits rather than adding them. Three missing sixteenths in a bar is a substantial event at this density.
• Clipping over compressionHard clipping rather than a limiter, so the peaks are squared off and the harmonic content changes with level. Every gain stage is part of the sound design.

How to get them

• Build the source hitStart with a 909 kick or a recorded impact of about 200ms. Distort with a waveshaper at 20 to 30 decibels of drive, high-pass at 60Hz, then clip the output flat. Resample the result and work from the sample.
• Program velocity, not notesFill every sixteenth, then set the beats to around 110 to 118, the ands to 74 and everything else to 52. Do not vary the sample; vary how hard it hits the distortion.
• Automate the filterA band-pass with resonance at 70 percent, cutoff drawn by hand from 200Hz to 3kHz over sixteen bars, placed after the distortion so the filter shapes harmonics that already exist.
• Punch holesMute two or three sixteenths per bar in the second half of a loop. Choose the e of 2, the and of 3 and the last sixteenth rather than anything symmetrical.
• Keep the snare off the backbeatIf you want a noise burst, put it on the a of 3 or the e of 4. The moment it lands on 2 and 4 the whole thing reads as a distorted techno record instead.
• Sidechain nothingThere is nothing to duck. Mix the kick bus at minus six, put a clipper on the master, and let the parts fight; the fighting is what produces the texture.

Reference points

Converter, Winterkaelte, Imminent, Somatic Responses, Esplendor Geometrico, P.A.L., and the Ant-Zen and Hands catalogues. Reference points for the sound rather than endorsements.