Saturday 14 November 2015

The drum and bass beat - What makes drum and bass drum and bass

I recently realized the answer to the question nobody ever asks: What makes drum and bass drum and bass?

I came back to SL after a long time not in the world. I had always loved djing when I was in-world, but I never much did anything else. And now I know why. After playing tons of games between then and now, I finally realized how lame SL looked when I played it back then. The animations were just so bad. Of course, I had never learned anything back then about AOs, I just came in, djed for 2-3 hours, and then left. This time when I came back, I knew about animations so I got a better walk, run, fly, you know. And I have been using those as-was for a couple of months now. But something still wasn't right...

Until yesterday, when I finally succeeded in making a walking sound script work. What I had been missing all this time was the walking sound!

Ok, so drum and bass. Or more specifically, the drum and bass beat. Put simply, the drum and bass beat, every drum and bass beat, is the Amen break (or some variant) from a 1969 song by the Winstons called "Amen Brother."

From Wikipedia:

The Amen break is a 6 to 7 second (4 bar) drum solo performed in 1969 by Gregory Cylvester "G. C." Coleman in the song "Amen, Brother" performed by the 1960s funk and soul outfit The Winstons. The full song is an up-tempo instrumental rendition of Jester Hairston's "Amen," which he wrote for the Sidney Poitier film Lilies of the Field (1963) and which was subsequently popularized by The Impressions in 1964. The Winstons' version was released as a B-side of the 45 RPM 7-inch vinyl single "Color Him Father" in 1969 on Metromedia (MMS-117), and is currently available on several compilations and on a 12-inch vinyl re-release together with other songs by The Winstons.

It gained fame from the 1980s onwards when four bars (6 seconds) sampled from the drum-solo (or imitations thereof) became very widely used as sampled drum loops in breakbeat, hip hop, breakbeat hardcore, hardcore techno and breakcore, drum and bass (including oldschool jungle and ragga jungle), and digital hardcore music. The Amen Break was used extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music—"a six-second clip that spawned several entire subcultures." It is one of the most sampled loops in contemporary electronic music and arguably the most sampled drum beat of all time.

Note that the original Amen break was itself part of a remix of sorts. For a fascinating history of the Amen break, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac

So what is the connection between the missing walking sound and drum and bass? People think that drum and bass is about exactly that, the drums and the bass. Technically, this is true. But every type of music has a drum and a bass in it, so what makes this particular type of music take on the name itself, "drum and bass?"

Quite simply, it's the hi-hat shuffle played at 170 beats per minute. The hat shuffle is why the first person to sample the Amen break did it. It's what makes you bob your head and dance. And the shuffle is on an upbeat, so that as you count out a song, the hits of the hats come after the main downbeat counts. Something like 1 da-da-DA-da, 2 da-da-DA-da and so on.

But I get ahead of myself. A basic drum and bass beat is composed of a kick, a snare and the hats. The length of a basic loop is 16 beats, so count to 16 at the speed of 170 beats per minute (remember your basic physics: distance (d) = rate (r) x time (t) so rate = d/t if you want to know how fast that is). The bass plays on the 1 and 11 beats, and the snare plays on the 5 and 13 beats. These two alone make a beat that is surely recognizable as drum and bass, but still something isn't right. Something is missing. The little shuffle sound of the hats. The hat shuffle, in its various incarnations, is what makes drum and bass drum and bass.

Further reading:

DnB HiHat explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sclVMvTHlmk

A good history of drum and bass:


For a scholarly treatise on drum and bass: http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_03/pdf/quinn.pdf

Friday 6 November 2015

Bonfire Party 5th November

For 400 years, bonfires have burned on November 5th to mark the failed Gunpowder Plot to blow up the houses of parliament in London in 1605.   Among them was Guy Fawkes, Britain's most notorious traitor.  People place effigies of Guy fawkes onto bonfires (we threw a noob on lol), and fireworks were added to the celebrations.

Thanks to DJs Jahka Flow, Makro, Devour for mixing DnBs and everyone that came, was a good fun party