Love it? Hate it? Here’s how you make it.
After spending years in South London as an underground sensation, dubstep has become one of the fastest growing types of music in the world, and it’s steadily sweeping through American households. A massive subculture is shaping itself around this music, with fans of formally contrasting genres coming together to experience the bass-infused phenomena. Sometimes, a little humor helps ease you into something new, so we’ve come up with what we consider to be the five building blocks of a dubstep song.
1. Structure
You may be surprised, but making a dubstep track requires a certain level of discipline. Throughout its existence, there have been multiple spinoffs, but a general structure has remained within all of those loud noises. The songs are separated into four parts: the intro, the bass drop (see no. 5), the main riff, and the outro. As you can see, now there are even professional dubstep instructors. Maybe it’s the accent, but this guy makes dubstep production sound Ivy League.
2. Robotic Rage
To some, listening to dubstep may stir up fears of a Skynet takeover. There’s a polar debate on the quality of dubstep as a music form, and some passionately criticize its growing popularity. However, unlike Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, many people sincerely enjoy the industrial sounds of Skrillex and the like.
3. Reverberating Drum Patterns
The reverberating drum patterns give dubstep its “dance music” classification. Its tempo is elevated in the range of 138-142 beats-per-minute. This use of syncopated rhythms provides each song with unique twists and turns, ultimately allowing listeners to create their own unpredictable journeys of movement.
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