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Video: Key & Peele: Dubstep


keybdwizrd

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I must really be an old fart. The first time I heard a dubstep song, I didn't know what it was called but I liked it. I listened to some more - I think it was by "Figure" - and it sounded exactly the first song I heard. I left it alone and went back and listened to some more and it sounded like the first two or three songs. I am not sure why the songs all sounded the same, but perhaps it is due to my neural net having converged to a point where I just can't hear much difference.

So what is it that differentiates one song in this style from another?

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that's a good skit, i must say that even my picky sense of humor very much enjoys Key & Peele. this skit in particular made me pause for massive laughter -




as far as dubstep - i try to stay out of that business, surprisingly high number of dubstep producers in my medium sized midwestern town though. lots of sample packs out there for this genre i guess, none of them know much about synths...
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Dubstep's pretty old, 10 years I think? The brostep sound is big now* in the US, kinda reminds me of the way d'n'b/jungle went for a little while around 1998-2000 particularly in the US I think?

*actually it's prob peaked a year or two ago and the backlash is in full effect.

Ppl were saying the same stuff about d'n'b and trance 10+ years ago and then everyone moved on to hate electroclash.

I remember first hearing dubstep around 2006 or so, one of the "This is Dubstep" compilations. I was "I will like this,I like me some dub and I like d'n'b and 2-step" and I put it on in the store and thought it was boring. (It was the old UK sound so it was pretty soft.) Then I was like, "How high do you have to be to find this interesting?" But I kept listening to dubstep now and then and after a while I "got it" and got into it.

Burial is one artist I particularly like who's atypical dubstep and not brostep at all. I do like some Knife Party and even Skrillex though. :p

The kind of dubsteppy music I make (sometimes) is ambient really, it just uses dubstep sounds.

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Quote Originally Posted by liliththekitten View Post
*actually it's prob peaked a year or two ago and the backlash is in full effect.
Yeah, it was never *hugely* popular here, if it wasn't for Skrillex a year ago no one would have heard of it, and it does half feel like the trend already came and went. The UK scene still doesn't have a lot of those harsh Skrillex lines, the new trend seems to be "mix-and-match", like drum and bass producers making an electro house track that happens to have a dubstep drop for the hell of it.

The first I heard of the D&B genre was the ragga jungle stuff, which I found rather interesting. Never made it over here much. The darker almost industrial styles seemed to be what the US wanted in their short lived fad. The jazzy / ambient D&B style isn't even spun much as far as I can tell, although an LTJ Bukem show I went to was well attended.
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Quote Originally Posted by liliththekitten View Post
Dubstep's pretty old, 10 years I think? The brostep sound is big now* in the US, kinda reminds me of the way d'n'b/jungle went for a little while around 1998-2000 particularly in the US I think?

*actually it's prob peaked a year or two ago and the backlash is in full effect.

Ppl were saying the same stuff about d'n'b and trance 10+ years ago and then everyone moved on to hate electroclash.

I remember first hearing dubstep around 2006 or so, one of the "This is Dubstep" compilations. I was "I will like this,I like me some dub and I like d'n'b and 2-step" and I put it on in the store and thought it was boring. (It was the old UK sound so it was pretty soft.) Then I was like, "How high do you have to be to find this interesting?" But I kept listening to dubstep now and then and after a while I "got it" and got into it.

Burial is one artist I particularly like who's atypical dubstep and not brostep at all. I do like some Knife Party and even Skrillex though. :p

The kind of dubsteppy music I make (sometimes) is ambient really, it just uses dubstep sounds.
Wow, this post makes me feel so old and ignorant. I recognise so few of these genres and artists.
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Quote Originally Posted by BonsoWonderDog View Post
Wow, this post makes me feel so old and ignorant. I recognise so few of these genres and artists.
Yeah, me too.

Seems like 17 sub-genres of electronic music come and go before I've heard of two or three of them.

If you want to see something ridiculous (and it IS ridiculous), look at all of the electronic music genres listed on this Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...c_music_genres

I mean, is there anyone who can tell the difference between "darkcore jungle" and "hardcore jungle?"
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Quote Originally Posted by BonsoWonderDog View Post
Wow, this post makes me feel so old and ignorant. I recognise so few of these genres and artists.
To be helpful...

This is Burial.


This is Knife Party (dubstep from ex-members of the famous D&B / electronic something collective
).


I am not sure how you could even consider these two tunes the same genre. idn_smilie.gif (Though to be fair, Burial is far more unclassifiable, kind of more like an ambientish two-step to me.)
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Quote Originally Posted by BonsoWonderDog

View Post

Wow, this post makes me feel so old and ignorant. I recognise so few of these genres and artists.

 

That's because now days, entire genres come and go overnight, based around some completely narrow tiny thing. It's almost not worth finding out, unless you are into it. Just wait a few moments, and the genre is gone. biggrin.gif
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Quote Originally Posted by soundwave106 View Post
Yeah, it was never *hugely* popular here, if it wasn't for Skrillex a year ago no one would have heard of it, and it does half feel like the trend already came and went. The UK scene still doesn't have a lot of those harsh Skrillex lines, the new trend seems to be "mix-and-match", like drum and bass producers making an electro house track that happens to have a dubstep drop for the hell of it.

The first I heard of the D&B genre was the ragga jungle stuff, which I found rather interesting. Never made it over here much. The darker almost industrial styles seemed to be what the US wanted in their short lived fad. The jazzy / ambient D&B style isn't even spun much as far as I can tell, although an LTJ Bukem show I went to was well attended.
true.

The first time I heard jungle/d'n'b was in '94. Ragga was a favorite and there was ragga, atmospheric, dark, hardcore, etc sounds often all mashed up, often in the same track. At the time,jungle sounded like sheer sonic chaos to me, along with the Amens, etc,and I loved it... I'd been a bit of a hardcore fan before that but this sounded like something else. I think d'n'b got steadily boring after that, atmo was trendy for a while (esp after those d'n'b Everything But the Girl remixes) and I really liked it but Bukem kept doing past its sell-by date and it wasn't as good really. The American tunes I like were from Liquid Sky artists and I'm not sure how well they held up.

also the dark hardcore from around '92-93, which evolved into jungle is a favorite, I think it was some of the best dance music ever.
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Quote Originally Posted by keybdwizrd View Post
Yeah, me too.

Seems like 17 sub-genres of electronic music come and go before I've heard of two or three of them.

If you want to see something ridiculous (and it IS ridiculous), look at all of the electronic music genres listed on this Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...c_music_genres

There's also Ishkur's guide. It's not all accurate or 100% serious and it hasn't been updated for 10-12 years but it is a good read:

http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/music.swf


Metal is similarly ridiculous with its subgenres though not to quite the same degree:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_metal_subgenres

Metal fans will be able to tell the difference for the most part... I can... mostly... though outsiders might say they all sound the same. (I can't imagine anyone mistaking Death for Glam Metal though.)


>I mean, is there anyone who can tell the difference between "darkcore jungle" and "hardcore jungle?"

Yes.

I kind of mentioned it above. Darkcore was dark hardcore and a predecessor to jungle. Hardcore is jungle with hardcore sounds, can be uplifting, can be dark. So there is overlap between the two, as there with other kinds of music.
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Quote Originally Posted by mate_stubb

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That's because now days, entire genres come and go overnight, based around some completely narrow tiny thing. It's almost not worth finding out, unless you are into it. Just wait a few moments, and the genre is gone. biggrin.gif

 

It's actually slowed down and has been since the mid-90's or so. It was crazy for awhile. House/techno-influenced dance music (I don't like to say "EDM") was new in the late 80s/early 90's, the rave scene was going big and was also a movement of youthful rebellion ...all of that has quieted down by now. The last big development since 2000 was dubstep and that's old.
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I feel the over compartmentalization speaks volumes about the over-importantifying in our stupified civilization. It is like we are over complicating the littlest detail as a means of finding self importance of anything or everything. Technically speaking, there is probably 50 gazillion levels of color and invisible color in a rainbow, but do we tear out each thread of color in red and rename it to be something bigger than it is: a tiny part of a whole? No, it's just red. (well, paint companies might hahahaa)

Where any idiot can add whatever repetatively looped sample and they want and call it a new gerne is like if doctors spray painted virus cells and gave them a new name.

People used to make a quality SONG that stood on its own, was remembered for the song... now people dump buckets of noisey phlem into a "gerne" and think that is where it is at. But, it is forgotten seconds after the play button was pressed and replaced with the next phlem spillage.
Rather than creating new "genres", people should try making great music. Just a thought.

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Quote Originally Posted by wwwjd View Post
People used to make a quality SONG that stood on its own, was remembered for the song... now people dump buckets of noisey phlem into a "gerne" and think that is where it is at. But, it is forgotten seconds after the play button was pressed and replaced with the next phlem spillage.
That's what folks like to do, compartmentalize and divide into scenes and factions so they can pretend they are cool and pretend the rest of the world sucks.

Though to be honest these days a lot of stuff is released as "indie" that would've been in some bastardized pigeonholed scene before... in electronic music the one-upmanship posing that leads to scene-naming has slowed down a bit. The Internet has made scenes a bit sillier. Genres now are necessary mainly for the mood someone wants to evoke, so for instance someone wanting to do some yoga to some relaxing soundscapes doesn't turn on a station and get Merzbow.
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My guess is that people with synthesizers and DJs are just about the only people who could name more than a few genres of electronic music. For most people it would be a stretch to come up with techno, house, and trance, even those younger than 30. The rest of these genres existed for about as long as a piece of ununpentium, with some of them only known by three guys in Finland. (Actually, this generality probably applies more to people in the US than in Europe.) Of course, I herald from the golden days of arena rock, where a band that sold less than a million albums and couldn't get out of the clubs was considered a "failure" by many.

There are, of course, some electronic music fanatics and enthusiasts - look at the Electric Daisy Carnivals and their imitators. But unlike typical "concerts," those events are not so much about the individual artists as they are about the overall experience. And a festival with Skrillex or Swedish House Mafia on the bill will sell more tickets, because those are a couple of "performers" that lots of people in that scene have actually heard of by name.

And once again I'll say that this is mostly the situation in the States, whereas Europe has always seemed to have more of a mainstream affection for electronic music. That's my perception.

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Quote Originally Posted by Acid Hazard View Post
I still fail to see where Dub comes into play as far as Dubstep goes.

I believe the term "dubstep" is a combination of Jamaican Dub and 2-Step garage. Both were popular in Soho, London, (and particularly Club Forward) around the time that dubstep got started (1999 or so) -- although dubstep didn't really become popular until some years after.
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Quote Originally Posted by zoink

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I believe the term "dubstep" is a combination of Jamaican Dub and 2-Step garage. Both were popular in Soho, London, (and particularly Club Forward) around the time that dubstep got started (1999 or so) -- although dubstep didn't really become popular until some years after.

 

Yeah, if you notice, the beat *pattern* of dubstep still has a bit of the reggae / dub pattern -- third beat emphasis, for instance. (Though in dubstep the first beat is often an equal, unlike traditional reggae where the first is secondary to the third). Also, there's often a bit of relaxed swing in some dubstep that's very similar to what reggae / dub has.
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I always thought of Dubstep as super lazy dance music since the beat always seems to be exactly HALF of a full paced danced beat. Never really saw how "STEPping" was doable with dubstep. Just seemed a silly naming convention. It will never be a huge genre because there is no sex attached to it that involves girls. ....maybe robot sex, but ya gotta get the girl crowd to succeed. thus, DANCE music FTW

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In many cases what signifies dubstep is the fact that the filter-modulated bass line is taking on what would be the usual rhythm of hi hats. The so-called "wobble bass" will throb in quarter note triplets on 1 and 2, and switch to eighth note triplets on 3 and 4 (and sometimes go even faster than that).

You'll also often have a walking/plodding backing rhythm -- 140 bpm, kicks on 1 and 3, snares on 2 and 4 with some kind of run at the end of a phrase, or halfway through a phrase. Sometimes you'll also have kicks in 1/4 note triplets at the end of each measure (usually during a climax in the song itself).

That's pretty much it. You can otherwise put in just about anything you want to musically, even taking a piece from a completely different genre and remake it as dubstep.

Per esempio:



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i

Quote Originally Posted by wwwjd View Post
I feel the over compartmentalization speaks volumes about the over-importantifying in our stupified civilization. It is like we are over complicating the littlest detail as a means of finding self importance of anything or everything. Technically speaking, there is probably 50 gazillion levels of color and invisible color in a rainbow, but do we tear out each thread of color in red and rename it to be something bigger than it is: a tiny part of a whole? No, it's just red. (well, paint companies might hahahaa)

Where any idiot can add whatever repetatively looped sample and they want and call it a new gerne is like if doctors spray painted virus cells and gave them a new name.

People used to make a quality SONG that stood on its own, was remembered for the song... now people dump buckets of noisey phlem into a "gerne" and think that is where it is at. But, it is forgotten seconds after the play button was pressed and replaced with the next phlem spillage.
Rather than creating new "genres", people should try making great music. Just a thought.
but you are the one who copped to liking commercial trance which plenty of people think is utter crap. and they said the same exact stuff about it at the time.

as for subgenres they really only exist for djs and trainspotters. Ive been in the scene forever and most fans or people @ parties dont care. at most they know they are listening to something like house or jungle or dubstep and thats about it
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Quote Originally Posted by zoink View Post
I believe the term "dubstep" is a combination of Jamaican Dub and 2-Step garage. Both were popular in Soho, London, (and particularly Club Forward) around the time that dubstep got started (1999 or so) -- although dubstep didn't really become popular until some years after.
yes, this is where it came from. and this is why i was initially disappointed in it because i loves me some dub reggae

being an old dnb fan i wanted more beats in it too but noe i appreciate it on its own and approach making it like ambient or idm listening music
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