Shaabi

What it is

Ahmed Adaweyah was singing at weddings in Cairo in the early seventies when his cassettes started outselling everyone and the state broadcaster still would not play him. The word means popular in the sense of belonging to ordinary people, and it names an attitude as much as a sound: songs about rent, police, the cost of getting married and the business of getting by, sung in a Cairene street register and sold from kiosks rather than through a record industry. Shaaban Abdel Rahim, a laundry presser who became famous in 2000, is the other name everybody knows. The band is a tabla, a riq, a keyboard and an accordion, and the rhythm underneath is baladi, the wedding rhythm of the Nile valley, played by a person rather than a machine.

What it sounds like

Loud, close and entirely acoustic in the percussion. The tabla, a goblet drum with a fish skin or plastic head, is right on the microphone: the dum from the centre is round and short, the tek from the rim is a crack with almost no body behind it. A riq, the heavy Egyptian tambourine with brass jingles, plays the eighths and flourishes at the end of the bar. A second tabla answers underneath with soft ka strokes. Above them an accordion or an electric organ doubles the vocal line and a keyboard imitates a string section. There is no drum kit anywhere. Cassette masters were mixed to be loud on a taxi stereo and they distort willingly.

Key elements

• BaladiDum on beat 1 and the and of 1, tek on beat 2, dum on beat 3, tek on beat 4, with a soft tek on the and of 4 to turn the bar. Every Egyptian listener can name it.
• The second dumWhat separates baladi from maqsoum is a single stroke: baladi puts a second dum on the and of 1 where maqsoum puts a tek. Mahraganat, further down this file, is built on the other one.
• No kit at allThere is no hi-hat lane in this grid and no bass drum. The kick row is the tabla's dum, the riq is the top end, and putting a drum machine under all of that is roughly how mahraganat happened.
• The riqBrass jingles on the eighths, then a three stroke flourish across the last beat of the bar. It is heavy, it is metallic, and it is played with the fingers rather than shaken.
• A second tablaSoft ka strokes on the a of 1, the e of 2, the a of 3 and the a of 4, four in bar one, filling the sixteenths the first drum has left open.

How to get them

• Play baladiDum, dum, tek, then dum and tek. Get it under your hands on a table before you sequence it, because the difference between this and maqsoum is one stroke and it is easy to draw the wrong one.
• Tabla soundClose mic a goblet drum, or use a sample set with separate dum, tek and ka articulations. A single sample transposed up and down will not do it, because the strokes are different sounds rather than different pitches.
• RiqThe heavy Egyptian tambourine with brass jingles, played with the fingers against the rim. It belongs at the front of the mix, not tucked in under the drums.
• Leave the kit outNo hi-hat, no kick sample, no clap. If the arrangement feels thin, add the second tabla or a second riq rather than reaching for a drum machine.
• Keyboard, not stringsAn electric organ or a cheap string preset doubling the vocal line in unison. Real strings make it sound like a more respectable genre, which is the opposite of the point.
• Let it distortCassette masters clipped and nobody went back to fix them. Drive the mix bus a decibel or two into saturation and leave the transients squared off.

Reference points

Ahmed Adaweyah, Hassan el Asmar, Shaaban Abdel Rahim, Abdel Basset Hamouda, Saad El Soghayar, and the Cairo cassette kiosks that sold all of it while state radio would not. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.