The Evolution of Beat Music
Electronic music has exploded in popularity in recent decades and has taken on dozens of different forms. Its influence has worked its way into countless other styles of music, too. Lots of dance music, hiphop beats, and other forms of programmed music are built around a solid drum groove. This beat-centric music is appropriately known as Beat Music.
While most Beat Music is sequenced using samplers, synthesizers, and digital instruments, many modern musicians (especially drummers) attempt to reverse engineer and emulate programmed drum parts in an effort to merge improvisation with the sounds of electronic music. Since Beat Music is so heavily centered around the drums, it naturally attracts drummers looking to try new textures and grooves. It’s an incredibly fun and challenging style to explore since drummers try to recreate processed drum sounds with acoustic instruments. But what led to pushing the drums and bass to the center of attention?
The Beginnings
The roots of a lot of modern electronic music trace back to British dub and reggae DJs in the 1980s. The influence of dub tracks spun out a cohort of young producers creating innovative new sounds. Some of the most influential electronic music producers of all time come from England, including Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Fatboy Slim, and The Prodigy. Producers began sampling and repurposing drum breaks from American funk and soul tracks from the 1960s and 70s, but cranked up the speed and intensity to create hard-hitting grooves. However, the resulting music spurred in many different directions.
Big Beat
Big Beat music is generally characterized by heavy drum samples consisting of breakbeats and drum rolls, as well as synth loops, vocal samples, and rapping. The term “Big Beat” dates back to 1989, when Iain Williams used it to describe the style of his group, Big Bang. The genre gained popularity in the early 1990s and is immediately identifiable by its compressed, aggressive drum samples and short, often repetitive vocal samples.
Tempo is a key differentiator between different styles of electronic music. Songs in the style of Big Beat typically have a tempo ranging between 100 and 140 bpm (beats per minute). Distorted bass lines and other loops were programmed using synthesizes, which pair nicely with the gritty, relentless breakbeats. Songs often feature other miscellaneous aggressive sound samples, like explosions, sirens, and crashing effects. Some particularly influential names in Big Beat are Fatboy Slim, The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, and Groove Armada.
Drum and Bass
One of the most popular and longest-lasting forms of beat music is Drum and Bass, commonly referred to as DnB. Originating at the very beginning of the 1990s, the style is generally characterized by the dominance of, well, the drums and the bass (who’da thunk!?). Drum grooves are typically fast and hard-hitting, with lots of influence from emerging dub and reggae music in the 1980s. Some of the iconic drum breaks from Soul music in the 1960s were resurrected and repurposed for this new style. The Amen Break and the groove from James Brown’s “Funky Drummer” laid the foundation for drum programming for decades to come. Learn more about the history of funk drumming and its impact on modern music here.
To really separate Drum and Bass from other styles of electronic music, producers often switched through different breakbeats and drum sounds between measures or even individual beats. Cycling through drum samples creates very syncopated grooves with seemingly no consistency, whereas a style like Techno relies more heavily on consistent, steady grooves. Drum and Bass beats are typically faster, residing between 160 and 180 bpm. Since breakbeats and heavy bass are the driving forces behind the genre, other instrumental elements, like synth pads or vocal samples, provide more atmosphere and effect instead of a melody.
Nowadays, Drum and Bass is a sort of generalized term, which splintered to encompass many other sub-genres of electronically composed music. Hundreds of artists fall under the umbrella of DnB - there are too many to list here! (But there’s a solid list here.) While there are dozens of other forms of Beat Music that emerged throughout the 1990s, Big Beat and DnB dominated the scene for the decade. Although Big Beat fell out of popularity by the beginning of the 2000s, the flexibility and open-ended definition of DnB allowed it to persist and evolve further.
Intelligent Dance Music
Originating just after but developing alongside DnB in the early 1990s, Intelligent Dance Music (IDM) provides a more chilled out take on DnB by focusing more on ambient elements and creating an atmosphere. The music was better suited for kicking back at home and really focusing on the music instead of thrashing around at a rave. While the term “Intelligent Dance Music” has been rebuked by producers and fans alike for coming across as pompous, it has stuck around for close to three decades.
While the drums are still a central focus of most IDM music, emphasis is shifted from away from the bass in favor of various ambient textures. Since dancing isn’t a concern for IDM listeners, drum beats are sometimes incredibly intricate and chaotic, with no repetition or consistency whatsoever. Perhaps a more appropriate and catch-all term is Experimental Electronic Music. After all, IDM isn’t really supposed to be dance music and people generally dislike the pretentious vibe put out by the word “intelligent” (not that intelligence is bad, or anything). Some notable artists include Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Venetian Snares.
The experimental nature of IDM encourages artists to apply more advanced rhythmic concepts, like odd time signatures and polyrhythms. Artists will also physically modify computer hardware and synthesizers to “destroy” sounds and create all sorts of new, unconventional sonic textures. In particular, Aphex Twin’s production techniques are shrouded in mystery and surrounded by rumors. While he has spoken about making his own analogue instruments from scratch and altering existing gear, it’s also rumored that he programs his own software instruments and even coded his own DAW (digital audio workstation). His tendency to behave sarcastically and outright lie in interviews doesn’t provide many answers to the curious. But because of his one-of-a-kind instruments and coding knowledge, his sound and production techniques are impossible to authentically recreate.
Trap
While Big Beat, Dnb, and IDM reflected the UK sound, the US spawned its own unique forms of Beat Music on the heels of the hiphop scene. Trap beats originated in the early 1990s, particularly in Atlanta and the Southern US, with a sound that departed from both hiphop and electronic dance music of that time. Although the concept dates back about 30 years, trap beats didn’t gain widespread popularity until the 2000s and 2010s, and weren’t even known as “trap” beats until 2003, with the release of T.I.’s album Trap Muzik.
Trap beats are identified primarily by the drums. Grooves are frequently in a halftime feel (backbeat on count 3) with incredibly busy hihat patterns consisting of tight rolls, and mixtures of 32nd notes and triplets. Bass drum samples are often tuned to specific pitches, which function as the bass line. Instrumentation is usually sparse, with only rapping and an additional ambient synth or two to support the drums. Trap beats are usually between 70 and 100 bpm.
The first wave of trap artists from the 90s to see mainstream success include Lil Jon, Outkast, and Goodie Mob. But throughout the 2000s, trap music exploded in popularity thanks to artists such as T.I., Gucci Mane, Lil Wayne, and Waka Flocka Flame rapping over beats produced by and in the styles of Shawty Redd and Lex Luger. Trap is currently one of the most popular styles of music in the US, with artists like Post Malone, Travis Scott, Cardi B, and Drake frequently topping record charts.
Beat Music Played Live
While these forms of programmed music emerged, a parallel movement that attempted to produce the sounds of electronic music with live instruments developed. Musicians, particularly drummers, especially sought to bring more of an improvised element to the sounds of DnB.
To achieve the sound of compressed drum samples, drummers will often play with items placed on the snare drum to act as muffling and to change the pitch and timbre. Cymbal stacks are often used as auxiliary hihats, and chains are placed on cymbals to create a wide range of tones and effects. Sometimes, drummers will set up multiple snare drums of different tunings and muffling to better emulate a sample bank in a drum computer. Sampler pads and triggers are often used to intertwine electronic elements with an acoustic drum set.
Some notable musicians that bring the elements of improvisation to Beat Music are Jojo Mayer’s band Nerve, Deantoni Parks, Mark Guiliana, Louis Cole, JD Beck, and the various projects of Zach Danziger.
As styles of music evolve, so do the instruments that musicians use to create. Sunhouse Inc’s Sensory Percussion allows drummers, like Ian Chang, to create extremely detailed and lush soundscapes from the familiarity of a drum set. By using advanced drum triggers that essentially divide a playing surface into multiple programmable zones, drummers can orchestrate and perform entire arrangements using dozens of different sounds.
The mass appeal of electronic music and the ability for the average person to take on electronic music production is all thanks to the digital synthesizer and the improvement of DAWs. Instead of needing to purchase samplers, drum machines, and diving down the rabbit hole of modular synthesizers, an entire recording studio lives within software, such as Ableton, Logic, and Renoise. People can compose, perform, and record complex music and arrangements on a laptop!
The cycle of producers sampling and imitating drummers and then drummers emulating programmed beats will continue to push Beat Music into different directions. There are always ways to push a concept further!
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