Slap House

What it is

Imanbek was nineteen and working on a railway in Kazakhstan when his remix of Roses became one of the most streamed records of 2020. The style he was working in had come out of Brazil about five years earlier, where Alok and Vintage Culture and Bhaskar took the deep house tempo, dropped a single distorted bass note on every offbeat eighth, and removed nearly everything else. Brazilian bass is what the producers called it. Slap house is what the internet called the version that spread, and the name is a fair description of what the bass actually does. It is a short, hard, heavily ducked note that lands between the kicks and is gone before the next one arrives, and on a loop carrying nine kicks, five claps and nine closed hats it is doing most of the work by itself.

What it sounds like

Almost bare. A clean, medium length kick, a clap on 2 and 4 with very little tail on it, a quiet closed hat on the offbeat eighths, and one open hat in two bars. Everything else in the mix is the bass and the vocal. The bass is a saw or a square with a fast attack and a decay short enough that it has stopped before the kick returns, saturated in the midrange, summed to mono, living between 80Hz and 400Hz. Above it there is usually a topline, often a pitched-up sample of a well known song, and a pad somewhere in the far background. Mastering is quiet by festival standards and very wide.

Key elements

• The slapOne bass note on each offbeat eighth, 130 to 160ms long, saturated and mono. It has no filter movement and no melody beyond following the root of the chord underneath.
• A top end with almost nothing in itNine closed hats and a single open hat across two bars. Anything busier up there and the offbeat bass stops being the loudest event between the kicks.
• Clean kick, no clippingMedium length, gentle click, mastered several decibels below what big room would do to the same sample. The whole style depends on there being level left over for the bass.
• One open hatIt lands on the and of 4 of bar two and appears nowhere else. That single hit is all that marks where the two bar loop turns over.
• The pitched-up toplineA vocal shifted up three or four semitones with the formant moved along with it. It is the hook, and in a mix this sparse it has nowhere at all to hide.

How to get them

• BassOne saw, low-passed at 400Hz, amp decay about 140ms, hard-clipped by 3dB and summed to mono. Put it on the offbeat eighths and give it a 20ms release so it is gone before the kick.
• Sidechain10dB from the kick with a 140ms release on the bass, the pad and the vocal. At 122 that means everything is back at level by the offbeat, which is what leaves the slap exposed.
• KickAbout 260ms, peak at 55Hz, click low in level, and do not clip it. If the kick is louder than the bass the record turns into big room and loses the thing that made it work.
• Keep the hats outOffbeat eighths at 50 to 54 and one open hat. Every extra hi-hat takes energy away from the bass, which is the part carrying the groove on its own.
• ToplinePitch a vocal up three semitones with formant correction on, then a 1 second plate ducked hard by the kick. It should sit close to the front and slightly wide.

Reference points

Alok, Vintage Culture, Bhaskar, Imanbek, Dynoro, and the Spinnin, Controversia and Effective catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.