Riddim

What it is

This one grew on YouTube and Bandcamp rather than in a club, from about 2015, and it borrowed an old Jamaican word for the instrumental track. What the modern usage means is narrow and specific: a two or three note bass figure, usually gallopping in triplets, repeating for eight bars at a time with tiny changes to its filter and its wave shape. Subfiltronik, Infekt, Phiso and Kompany built a scene on it. The drums are deliberately unhelpful. Because the bass carries all the rhythmic information, the kit is stripped back further than in any other kind of dubstep, and what remains exists only to mark the corners of the bar. Deathstep is the same construction with the distortion pushed until it clips, and it sits on the same grid.

What it sounds like

Repetition and grit. One bass patch, usually a square through a notch filter and a light waveshaper, playing the same short figure over and over while the filter creeps. The changes are small and constant: a formant moved, a phaser rate nudged, a note dropped. Drums are dry, punchy and few, with a snare that cracks and disappears. There is almost no melodic content above the bass, and where there is, it is a single two note motif or a vocal sample of someone saying something threatening. It is designed to be legible on a phone speaker and physical on a rig, with nothing in between.

Key elements

• The two note figureRoot and one neighbour, repeated in a triplet gallop. Writing more notes than that is the most common way to stop making this genre by accident.
• Filter movement instead of melodyA notch or formant filter creeping across eight bars, so the interest comes from timbre changing under a figure that does not.
• Drums as furnitureA kick, one snare and two or three hats a bar. They mark where the bar starts and where the middle is, and they leave every other sixteenth to the bass.
• The triplet gallopThe bass sits in threes against a bar counted in fours, which is where the lurch comes from. It is not written into the drum grid and it never has been.
• Silence between hitsEach bass note is gated so it stops dead. The gaps between them read as rhythm, and filling them with reverb kills the pattern.

How to get them

• BassA square into a notch filter, then a phaser at a very slow rate, then a gate keyed from the note. Write two notes, loop for eight bars, and automate only the notch frequency.
• Write the gallop in tripletsSet your grid to eighth-note triplets for the bass track only and keep the drums on sixteenths. That mismatch between the two tracks is the genre in one sentence.
• KickShort and clicky, high-passed at 45Hz, tuned two semitones above the bass root so the two never occupy the same fundamental.
• SnareOne layered hit, bright, with a 0.4 second gated room. It appears once a bar and needs to be loud enough to be an event when it does.
• Leave the hats outTwo closed hats a bar, three at the very most, and one open. Any more and the bass stops sounding like the rhythm section, which is the only job it has.
• Swing50 percent. The triplets in the bass supply all the lopsidedness the track can carry, and swinging the drums on top of them just smears the grid.

Reference points

Subfiltronik, Infekt, Phiso, Kompany, Sam Lamar and Bommer, plus the Disciple and Riddim Network output. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.