Uptempo Hardcore

What it is

By about 2014 the Dutch scene had a problem: mainstream hardcore at 150 had been perfected and there was nowhere left to take it. What the younger producers did was raise the tempo back toward 200 and turn the kick roll from a fill into the main event. A roll here is not four identical hits. Each one is tuned, so a beat of sixteenths spells out a rising or falling line, and a track is built from those lines the way a trance track is built from a lead. Angerfist and Dr Peacock crossed into it, Rejecta and Sefa pushed it further, and it is now the dominant sound on the hard stages at the large Dutch festivals.

What it sounds like

Short, extremely distorted kicks arriving in bursts, each one a slightly different pitch, so a bar has melodic contour in it despite containing no melodic instrument. The gaps between bursts are almost empty. A hard electric snare punctuates rather than keeping time. Above it, screeches built from the same kick sample, a shouted vocal, and very little else. There is no bassline, because the roll is the bassline, and no hi-hats, because at 195 a burst of sixteenths already fills the space.

Key elements

• Tuned kick rollsFour sixteenths where each hit is a different pitch, usually climbing a minor triad. This is the melodic content of the track and it is played on a bass drum.
• Rolls in every barWhere mainstream hardcore saves the roll for the end of a phrase, this uses one or two a bar, in different places, so the pattern is never at rest for long.
• Punctuating snareAn electric snare on beat 2 rather than on 2 and 4, with at most a ghost before the loop point. It marks the bar rather than keeping the pulse, which the rolls already do.
• No hats, no bassThe grid has neither hi-hat lane and there is no bass part in the track. Between the rolls and the kick tails there is nothing left for either to do.
• Screech from the kickThe lead is the kick sample pitched up three octaves and filtered. Sharing a source with the drums is what makes these tracks sound like one machine.

How to get them

• Make a short kickAround 180ms of tail, heavily distorted, with a hard transient. Anything longer and a sixteenth roll at 195 turns into one continuous tone rather than four events.
• Tune the rollPut the kick on a sampler and play the roll from a keyboard: root, minor third, fifth, octave over four sixteenths. Print it and treat the printed roll as a single sound.
• Velocity is the shapeClimb from about 96 to 122 across a roll. Flat velocities read as a stutter, a fault or a dropout; a climb reads as intent and is the difference between this and a broken loop.
• Leave the gaps aloneResist filling the beats between rolls. The rolls only land because the bar around them is nearly empty, and adding hats or a bass removes the effect entirely.
• Write four bars, not oneBecause the rolls are melodic, the unit is four bars with a contour across it. A one bar loop with a roll in it sounds like a stuck record.
• Check it at 210The scene has drifted upward every year and DJs pitch these up. If your rolls turn to mush at 210, shorten the kick rather than slowing the track down.

Reference points

Rejecta, Sefa, Dr Peacock, Angerfist in his faster work, Mad Dog, Deadly Guns, and the Gearbox, Triple Six and Masters of Hardcore catalogues. Reference points for the sound rather than endorsements.