Witch House

What it is

Travis Egedy, recording as Pictureplane, made the phrase up in a 2009 interview as a joke about a genre that did not exist. Within a year it did. Salem's King Night came out on IAmSound in 2010, Robin Carolan started Tri Angle and put out oOoOO and Balam Acab, Disaro and Phantasma Disques filled in the rest, and the scene adopted a naming convention full of triangles and crosses that made every record almost impossible to search for. Be clear about what the drums are, because the page is more useful that way: this is a Houston-screwed Memphis and trap grid, halved in tempo and left there. The rhythm is borrowed and the borrowing is deliberate. What makes a witch house record is what happens to that grid afterwards, which is several seconds of reverb, a pitch shift downward applied to the finished bounce, and a snare replaced by something that is not a drum.

What it sounds like

Submerged. Every element has been pitched down four to six semitones after the fact, so the sample rate artefacts are audible and everything has a slight wobble. The 808 is a long sine with no click, held so far past its own note that it functions as a drone. The backbeat is a reversed cymbal, a choir sample or a gated snare with six seconds of hall on it and the pre-delay pushed out to 80 milliseconds. Synths are supersaws and detuned bells buried under the same reverb. Vocals are chopped into single syllables, formant-shifted in both directions, and mixed at the level of a pad. There is almost no midrange left by the end.

Key elements

• A borrowed gridThe pattern is Memphis rap and trap at half speed, and pretending otherwise is not useful. Knowing that tells you to spend your effort on the processing rather than on the sequencer.
• The 808 as a droneA sine with a two second decay, glided between two notes, running under the whole bar. It stops being a kick around the third beat and becomes the bassline.
• A snare that is not a snareBeat 3 is carried by a reversed crash, a pitched choir stab or a gated hit drowned in hall. The one thing it must not be is a clean drum sample.
• Post-bounce pitch shiftThe whole mix is rendered, then dropped four to six semitones as audio. Doing it to individual tracks does not work, because the point is that everything moves together and degrades together.
• Chopped vocal syllablesSingle words cut to 200 milliseconds, formant-shifted up for one and down for the next, and placed on the sixteenths the drums do not use. Rarely intelligible and not meant to be.

How to get them

• Write it at 132, then halve itProgram a trap pattern at a normal tempo and then halve the project tempo rather than composing at 66. The hat divisions come out where a trap producer would have put them.
• Build the reverb firstA hall of five to seven seconds, pre-delay at 80 milliseconds, low-passed at 3kHz on the return. Set it before you place any hits, because you are writing for the tail rather than the hit.
• Replace the backbeatReverse a crash cymbal, put the reversed copy so it swells into beat 3, and let the original ring after it. That swell doing the work of a snare is most of the genre's signature.
• Pitch the renderBounce the finished loop, drop it four to six semitones with the tape or repitch algorithm rather than a formant-preserving one, and reimport. Everything should slow down together.
• Roll the hats faster than the gridAfter importing the MIDI, take the four sixteenths across beat 4 and retrigger them at 32nds or 64ths. At 66 bpm a sixteenth is 227 milliseconds, which is far too slow to read as a roll.
• Remove the midrangeCut three or four decibels around 1kHz across the master and add a shelf below 120Hz. The records this comes from sound like they are playing in the next room, and that is an EQ decision.

Reference points

Salem, oOoOO, Balam Acab, White Ring, Modern Witch, Mater Suspiria Vision and Pictureplane, plus the Tri Angle, Disaro and Phantasma Disques catalogues. Reference points for the sound, not endorsements.