UK Bass

What it is

Night Slugs put out its first twelves in 2010 and the writers covering them had to reach for a new word, because the records were not funky, not grime, not house and not dubstep while borrowing from all four. UK bass is the word they reached for. Bok Bok, L-Vis 1990, Girl Unit and Jam City wrote at around 130 with a broken kick, a hard clap on 2 and 4, and percussion lifted from soca and from early nineties R and B: cowbells, timbales, and synth stabs used as drums rather than as chords. The sub is short and pitched instead of held. It became the closest thing London had to a common language for the decade, and the American club styles of the same years talked back to it constantly.

What it sounds like

Hard, clean and metallic. Drum machine sounds treated like a design object: a clap with a tight gate on it, a cowbell tuned to sit in the riff, a snare that is really a filtered noise burst. The bass is a short square or FM pluck playing single notes with a fast decay, so the low end punctuates rather than sustains. Synths are cold and glassy, often a single detuned stab with a pitch envelope, and grime's siren logic shows up in the lead lines. Reverbs are short plates or none at all, and the whole record is mixed wide and bright with a hole where a vocal would be.

Key elements

• A kick that avoids the backbeatBeat 1, the e of 2, the and of 3. It never lands on 2 or 4 and never on beat 4 at all, so the clap owns those positions completely.
• Metallic percussionCowbells, timbales and rim hits doing the melodic work, tuned to the key rather than left at their factory pitch.
• Short pitched subOne or two note stabs with a 200 millisecond decay. The room is shaken in bursts, not held down, which is what keeps the tempo feeling quick.
• Sparse hatsFour offbeat eighths and a couple of ghosts on the e, and very little else. The percussion lane is the top end here, so the hats stay out of its way.
• Stabs as chordsSingle glassy hits with a pitch envelope, played on the offbeats, standing in for harmony without ever sustaining into a pad.

How to get them

• KickProgram 1, the e of 2 and the and of 3, then play it alone. If the loop already sounds finished without a bassline, you have got it. Short 909 kick, no sub tail.
• CowbellTune an 808 cowbell to the fifth of the key, gate it to about 80 milliseconds, and put it on the a of 1, beat 3 and the a of 3 where the kick is not.
• ClapA layered 909 clap and a noise burst, high-passed at 400Hz, with a 0.3 second gated plate. Dead on 2 and 4 and never anywhere else except the turnaround.
• BassAn FM pluck or a filtered square with a 200 millisecond decay and no sustain, playing two or three notes a bar in the gaps the kick leaves.
• SpaceLeave 400Hz to 2kHz almost empty and resist filling it. The records this comes from sound expensive because they are half as busy as they could be.
• Swing0.55. Enough to inherit garage's lean without landing in it, and low enough that the broken kick keeps its hard edges.

Reference points

Bok Bok, L-Vis 1990, Girl Unit, Jam City, Kingdom and Mosca, on Night Slugs, Numbers and Hessle Audio. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.