Shangaan Electro

What it is

Nozinja ran a phone repair shop in Soweto and produced music for Tsonga communities in Limpopo on the side, and around 2006 he did something nobody asks a producer to do: he doubled the tempo. Traditional Tsonga disco ran near 110. He took it to 180 and past it, replaced the guitar with a marimba patch, and built the rhythm out of handclaps and rattles instead of a kit. There is barely any kick in these records. What holds the floor is a clapping pattern, and what carries the tune is a marimba line moving so fast it reads as texture. Honest Jon's put out a compilation in 2010 and the tempo was the first thing everybody outside South Africa mentioned, which is fair, because it is genuinely twice as fast as anything near it.

What it sounds like

Bright, dry and relentless. Handclaps recorded close, a rattle running continuous sixteenths, a wooden click doubling the melody, and a marimba or xylophone patch playing a repeating figure at a speed no acoustic player would attempt. Vocals are sung by groups, often call and response, with almost no reverb on them. The bass is either absent or a single low note per phrase. Nothing is compressed hard, so the claps keep their transients and the record stays legible even though there are twelve things happening every beat.

Key elements

• The tempo180 and upward, roughly double Tsonga disco. It is the first thing anyone notices and the reason the rest of the arrangement had to change.
• Almost no kickTwo soft bass drum hits in bar one, on beats 1 and 3, at around velocity 85, and a pickup at the end of bar two. Everything a kick usually does is done by claps instead.
• Handclaps as the kitA clap figure that lands on beat 2, the and of 2, beat 4 and past it. The claps supply both the backbeat and the push into the next bar.
• A rattle on everythingContinuous sixteenths on a shaker or rattle, accented on the beats, at velocities between 34 and 62. It runs unbroken while everything around it starts and stops.
• The marimba lineA fast repeating melodic figure, doubled by a wooden click so the rhythm survives even when the pitch does not. This is the hook and the lead at once.

How to get them

• Set 180 and mean itWrite at the real tempo rather than writing at 90 and doubling. Parts written at half speed and sped up sit differently, and the claps in particular stop breathing.
• Build the clap part firstThree or four clap samples at different velocities, no reverb, panned within about twenty percent of centre. Get the bar working with claps alone before adding anything.
• Keep the kick tinyTwo hits in bar one, low-passed at 200Hz, under velocity 90. If you can hear it as a separate event you have made it too big.
• MarimbaA short mallet sample with almost no release, playing a five or six note figure in a pentatonic scale. Double it an octave up at half the velocity.
• Wooden clickA woodblock or claves on the strong points of the marimba figure. It is what lets the melody read as rhythm when the tempo makes the pitches blur.
• Straight gridSwing 0.5. At 180 a swung sixteenth is roughly 20 milliseconds of push and it turns the clap pattern into a flam rather than a groove.

Reference points

Nozinja, Tshetsha Boys, Tiyiselani Vomaseve, BBC, and the Shangaan Electro compilation on Honest Jon's. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.