Sleng Teng

What it is

A Casio MT-40 home keyboard, a preset labelled rock, and a tempo control. In late 1984 Noel Davey brought that keyboard to King Jammy's yard in Waterhouse, Wayne Smith sang over it, and Under Mi Sleng Teng came out in early 1985. The bassline is the preset's own rock accompaniment slowed down until it stops sounding like a demo, and the drums are the preset's own pattern: a plain backbeat on 2 and 4 with a kick on 1 and 3, which is a rock beat rather than a reggae one. That mismatch is half of why it landed. Within two years there were several hundred versions of the same riddim and the studio band economy of Jamaican music had collapsed. Every digital rhythm in this family descends from one keyboard preset played back slow.

What it sounds like

Thin, dry and entirely synthetic, which at the time was the shock. The bass is a square-ish preset with a fast decay, playing a repeating figure with a chromatic passing note in it. The drums are the MT-40's own voices: a short synthetic kick, a snare that is essentially a burst of filtered noise, and a hi-hat that is the same noise burst shortened. No room, no reverb on the kit, nothing played by hand. Over the top go a deejay or a singer and, usually, absolutely nothing else. The whole record fits in a few hundred bytes of ROM and one vocal take.

Key elements

• The MT-40 rock presetThe rhythm and the bass accompaniment from one preset on a consumer keyboard, slowed down. Not sampled, not rebuilt: played back off the machine and recorded.
• A backbeat on 2 and 4Reggae had put the accent on beat 3 for eighteen years. This riddim puts it back where a rock record has it, and the strangeness of that against a reggae bassline is the hook.
• The riddim economyOne rhythm track, hundreds of vocals over it. Sleng Teng is the point where that model stopped being occasional and became the whole industry.
• No live instrumentsNo drummer, no bass player, no horn section. The cost of making a record fell to the price of a keyboard, and who got to make records changed with it.
• Machine timeDead straight, no swing, no velocity variation. After twenty years of drummers leaning on sixteenths, the flatness was the new information.

How to get them

• Drum voicesShort synthetic samples with no room and no tail. Kick around 60Hz decaying in 120 milliseconds, snare as a noise burst band-passed at 1.5kHz, hat as the same burst cut to 30 milliseconds.
• BassA square wave through a low-pass with a fast envelope, one repeating figure with a chromatic step in it. Do not add sub weight or saturation; the original is thin and the thinness is the sound.
• Do not humaniseZero swing, identical velocities, no timing offsets. Any attempt to make this feel played removes the exact quality that made it a landmark.
• TempoBetween 66 and 84. The preset was built to run much faster, and slowing it a long way past its intended range is the single production decision that made the record.
• Leave it aloneFive voices and a vocal. Adding pads, counter melodies or a second percussion layer turns it into a different genre; the whole record is one keyboard and one singer.

Reference points

Wayne Smith, Noel Davey, King Jammy at Waterhouse, Tenor Saw, Johnny Osbourne, and the several hundred cuts of the riddim that followed. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.