Soca

What it is

Lord Shorty spent the early seventies trying to keep calypso alive against a wave of imported reggae and funk, and the thing he arrived at in 1973 mixed calypso's phrasing with Indo-Trinidadian percussion and a much heavier bottom end. He called it the soul of calypso. Two things happened after that. The tempo climbed, from calypso's amble up through the eighties until power soca settled somewhere around 155, and the arrangements got simpler and louder, built for a road march rather than a tent. Underneath the synths is a steelband engine room: an iron, which is a car brake drum hit with a bolt, a scratcher, and a bass drum. That iron pattern is the part that has not changed since before soca had a name.

What it sounds like

Enormous and cheerful. The kick is a modern four-to-the-floor with real sub under it, and the snare is a hard sampled crack with a short bright tail. Synth brass, usually a preset that sounds like a brass preset, plays stabs in unison. The bassline is simple and busy at once, following the kick and leaping an octave. Above everything, the iron: a metallic clang around 2 to 5kHz, dry, with no pitch you could name, played hard enough that it distorts. Vocals are shouted more than sung, with the whole studio joining in on the chorus, and the mix is loud, flat and made for a truck.

Key elements

• The ironA car brake drum struck with a metal bolt, from the steelband engine room. It plays a fixed eight-stroke pattern that sits across the beats and drives the whole thing forward.
• Four on the floorModern soca puts the kick on every beat, which separates it cleanly from calypso and from everything Jamaican. Underneath it the bass moves in eighths.
• The snare rollSixteenth strokes crossing the last beat of a phrase and getting louder. It works as a cue on the road, telling several thousand people that a break is coming.
• Groovy and powerTwo speeds, one genre. Groovy soca sits around 115 to 130 with more space in it; power soca runs at 150 and up and is what this pattern is written at.
• The shak-shakA shaker on the offbeats, filling the gaps the iron leaves. It is quiet in the mix and doing more work than it sounds like.

How to get them

• IronAny bright metallic sample with no pitch: a brake drum if you can find one, an agogo with the tone stripped out if you cannot. High-pass at 1kHz, drive it into distortion, and pan it dead centre.
• KickFundamental around 50Hz with a decay of about 200 milliseconds and a scooped mid so the iron and the snare have room. All four beats, with 1 and 3 about ten velocity above 2 and 4.
• SnareBright, high-passed at 250Hz, and short. Program the roll as sixteenths across the last beat of every eighth bar, climbing from 60 to 110, and let the last one land on the downbeat.
• BassEighth notes, sub-heavy, following the kick and jumping an octave on the last beat of the phrase. Sidechain it to the kick just enough to stop the two fighting below 60Hz.
• VocalTrack the chorus five or six times with different people, keep them all, and compress the group hard. Soca choruses are supposed to sound like a crowd because they are going to be sung by one.
• SwingStraight. All the push comes from the iron sitting between the beats, and any swing at 152 turns it into a shuffle that nobody can walk to.

Reference points

Lord Shorty, later Ras Shorty I, plus Lord Kitchener, Arrow, Super Blue, Machel Montano, Bunji Garlin, Destra Garcia, Kes, and the steelband engine rooms of Port of Spain. Named as reference points, not as endorsements.