Schranz
German, loud, and made of one loop being hit repeatedly with a hammer.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
Every one of the thirty two steps has something on it, which is the whole idea. The closed hats fill every sixteenth except the offbeats given to open hats at 104 to 110, only a little under the kick. Bar one ends with a doubled kick on the last sixteenth at 112; bar two ends with a three hit roll, 122 into 110 into 116, spilling over the loop point. The electric snare appears once in bar one, on beat 4, and twice in bar two. The crash marks the downbeat of bar one and beat 3 of bar two, and without it there is no telling which bar you are in.
What it is
Frankfurt and the Ruhr, late nineties into the mid 2000s, named by Chris Liebing after the sound of a record being scratched roughly. It is the most reduced music in this family: a distorted kick, a distorted loop, a crash, and almost nothing else, running for six minutes at 160 or more. The loops were often taken from other records, resampled and destroyed until the source was unrecognisable, and a lot of tracks were made specifically as DJ tools for three deck sets. It fell out of fashion completely in the late 2000s and has been coming back since the recent hard techno revival, usually at slightly lower tempos than it originally ran.
What it sounds like
A kick doubled and tripled into rolls at the end of bars, hats hammering every sixteenth at a volume that would be a mistake anywhere else, and open hats on the offbeats so loud they read as a second kick. A crash marks the top of each phrase. There is no bassline, no chord, no lead. What melodic information exists is a resampled fragment of something else, filtered until it is only a texture. Everything is clipped and the whole track sits inside about four decibels.
Key elements
- Kick rollsTwo or three kicks in a row on the last sixteenths of a bar, at slightly different velocities. In a style this uniform, that counts as the rhythmic variation.
- Hammering sixteenthsClosed hats on every sixteenth that is not an open hat, at velocities in the seventies and nineties. Loud, distorted and completely relentless.
- Loud open hatsDistorted open hats on the offbeat eighths at over 100, sitting nearly at kick level. On a big system these are as physical as the kick.
- The resampled loopA bar of something else, bounced, filtered, distorted and bounced again until only its rhythm survives. It replaces every melodic element.
- Crash as punctuationOne crash at the top of a phrase, and no other cymbal work. Nothing else in the arrangement marks a section change.
How to get them
- KickA short 909 kick clipped hard, no longer than 200ms, because at 160 a longer one overlaps the next. Roll off everything above 5kHz after the distortion or the mix turns to fizz.
- Kick rollsPlace two extra kicks on the last two sixteenths of every second bar with velocities a little under the main hit. Shorten each one further than the last so the roll stays defined.
- HatsSixteenths through a distortion unit and then a high-pass at 800Hz. Alternate two velocities so the pattern breathes slightly, and sidechain them a few decibels to the kick.
- The loopTake one bar of any percussive record, resample it through a filter and a saturator, then resample the result. Two passes will make almost anything unrecognisable.
- MixingClip rather than limit. A brickwall limiter pumps at this density; a soft clipper on the master just makes everything flatter, which is the intended result.
- LengthSeven minutes, with thirty two bars of clean kick and hats at each end. These are tools, and the DJ needs somewhere to mix.
Reference points
Chris Liebing, Arkus P, Robert Natus, DJ Rush, Sven Wittekind, Frank Kvitta, and the CLR, Nachtstrom and Kne Deep labels. Given as reference points for the sound rather than as endorsements.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.