Techstep
Drum and bass stripped down to metal, reverb and empty space.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
True tempo, 172, two bars. Count the hits: bar one has nine across all four lanes, where the jungle entry on this site has twenty. Bar two is the one-drop. There is no kick on beat 1 at all, and the first kick does not arrive until the and of 2, which leaves a full beat and a half of nothing but a snare tail at the point the listener expects the heaviest hit in the loop. The hats sit on the beats only. If it sounds empty on your monitors it is working, and the reverb on the snare is what is meant to fill it.
What it is
The 1996 reaction against the jazzier end of drum and bass. Ed Rush, Trace and Nico took the two-step, removed almost everything from it, and replaced the warmth with distorted textures borrowed from techno and industrial. No Reason and Amtrak's remix work made the template: fewer drum hits than anyone was playing, more space between them, and a snare put through so much compression and reverb that it fills the gap on its own. It is the bridge between jungle and neurofunk, and the reason the genre went from bright to dark in about eighteen months.
What it sounds like
Cold and cavernous. Metallic percussion, a snare with a long dark tail, and long stretches where nothing happens at all. The bass is a distorted low-passed growl rather than a clean sub. Everything is drenched in a large hall reverb that has been high-passed so it does not muddy the low end, and the overall impression is of machinery in a big empty room.
Key elements
- Fewer hitsHalf the drum hits of a jungle bar. Techstep works by subtraction, and every hit you take out makes the ones that remain sound heavier.
- The one-dropSkipping the kick on beat 1 of the second bar. Borrowed from reggae, and it is the single most identifiable techstep move because the ear expects the downbeat and gets nothing.
- Half-time hatsHats on the beats only, not the offbeats. At 172 that is still four hits a second across two bars, and it leaves room for the reverb tails.
- Distorted bassA saw through a low-pass, then through tube or bitcrush distortion, then band-passed to keep it out of the sub. Menace as a texture rather than as a note.
How to get them
- Snare and reverbA hard snare into a hall reverb at 2.5 to 3 seconds, high-passed above 400Hz, with the reverb return compressed so the tail swells rather than decaying naturally. The tail is what fills the empty beats.
- Take hits outProgram a normal two-step, then delete half the ghost notes and one of the kicks. If the pattern still sounds busy, delete more. This is genuinely the technique.
- Metallic percussionSample something struck, an anvil, a scaffold pole, a filing cabinet, and pitch it down two octaves. A resonant band-pass with a slow sweep on top gives you the tuned metal sound the genre lives on.
- Bass distortionSplit at 120Hz. Distort the upper band only, using a wavefolder or a driven tube emulation, and leave a clean sine below. Distorting the whole signal destroys the weight.
- Mix darkRoll off above 8kHz on the drum bus. Techstep records sound the way they do partly because the top end was deliberately dulled to make the midrange feel heavier.
Reference points
Ed Rush, Trace, Nico, Optical, Dom and Roland, Panacea, and No U-Turn and Emotif as labels. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements or as anyone to imitate.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.