Speedcore

What it is

Once terror reached 250 the remaining question was whether tempo had a ceiling, and a group of producers spent the next twenty years demonstrating that it does not. Speedcore starts around 300 and goes up. The tracks that matter are not the fastest but the ones that stay legible: m1dy in Tokyo, Noizecreator in Germany, the Fischkopf and Speedcore Worldwide catalogues. At this rate the kick stops being a rhythm and becomes a pitch, because a hit every fifty milliseconds is a twenty hertz tone. Producers use that deliberately, changing the kick rate to change the note, and the result sits somewhere between drumming and synthesis.

What it sounds like

A continuous buzzing low tone that is actually the kick repeating, punctuated by abrupt stops. Anything above the kick is fighting for space and usually loses: a screaming sample, a distorted vocal, a sine lead surviving only because it is louder than everything else. Silence is the loudest event in a speedcore track, because a bar of solid kicks followed by a hundred milliseconds of nothing is genuinely startling. Everything is clipped flat and the frequency range is narrow, mostly because there is nothing left to put in it.

Key elements

• Kick as toneSixteen kicks a bar at 300 is twenty hits a second, which the ear reads as a low buzz rather than as separate events. Changing the rate changes the perceived pitch.
• The stopTwo sixteenths with nothing at all, dropped into the middle of a bar. At this density the gap is the only dynamic tool available and it lands harder than any fill.
• No hats, no bass, no melodyThe grid carries a kick, a snare and a crash. There is no fourth lane, and adding one only removes definition from the kick, which is all anyone is listening to.
• Velocity as textureThe kicks alternate roughly 124, 104, 118, 100 rather than sitting flat. That four step cycle is audible as a rhythm inside the buzz and is the difference between a tone and a pattern.
• Very short tracksTwo minutes is normal and ninety seconds is common. There is a limit to how long this is tolerable and the good producers know exactly where it is.

How to get them

• Extremely short kickFifty milliseconds at most, because that is the whole gap available at 300. Take a distorted kick, cut it, fade the last five milliseconds, and normalise. Any tail at all and the pattern fuses into one drone.
• High-pass hardRoll off below 90Hz. Sixteen sub-heavy kicks a bar sum into a solid low block that no system can reproduce, and the definition lives between 150Hz and 2kHz here.
• Alternate velocitiesNever a flat lane. A repeating four step velocity cycle in the low hundreds gives the buzz an internal pulse, which is what stops it sounding like a fault in the file.
• Use silence deliberatelyOne or two sixteenths of complete nothing every bar or two, on an unpredictable step. Put it on the same beat each time and it becomes part of the loop instead of an interruption.
• Clip, never limitA limiter at twenty transients a second is permanently in gain reduction and produces a flat quiet mess. A hard clipper on the master keeps the transients and the loudness.
• Know where the ceiling isThis entry sits at 300 because that is the fastest tempo this site will write. Real speedcore goes to 600 and extratone past 1000, and to get there you change the project tempo rather than repitching the samples.

Reference points

m1dy, Noizecreator, DJ Skull Vomit, Gabber Piet in his faster material, Lenny Dee, and the Fischkopf, Speedcore Worldwide and Bloody Fist catalogues. Reference points for the sound, not endorsements.