I’ve been a fan of this genre for years, since my clubbing peak in the late 90s/early 00s. Artists I’m thinking about include Hybrid, BT, Sasha, Phil K, Burufunk. In my opinion the complex production and programming means it has aged better than a lot of music from that time. I have to admit I don’t know anything about the current state of this genre as I always just listen to music from that time. I also never really made this style of music though as I always thought it was beyond my capabilities…
I thought we could use this thread to share tunes, production tips etc.
Man, I remember DJ Hyper and co. playing in room 2 of the monthly Bedrock residency in London on Thursday nights. Circa 2005-6. That was a very cool moment for this sound.
My favorite breaks were around that same era from Tyrant, especially the sound on the No Cake, No Shoes double cd mix.
I was a big fan of Chable back in the day. And the Melbourne track is a classic. Progressive Breaks/House…agreed that much of it has stood the test of time better than most.
Hybrid, BT, Sasha, Way Out West, and Freeland (among many others) were regular listens for me back in the 00s. To say they all had an influence on my own music would be quite an understatement, and it’s a style I’ve been dipping back into lately (maybe I’ll post something relevant at some point).
Fwiw Hybrid have a new tune out and it’s a belter. Their Patreon offerings are also incredibly generous for fans of their earlier remixes and such.
Edit: Nubreed’s album The Original (both versions) is also a cracking listen that I never seem to see getting much love.
Ok, I will ask a specific question. To my ears, a characteristic of this genre is what I’ve always called the bass growl or whoomp (I’m not a technical man). I’ve always tried to make said sounds using filter sweeps and modulation, but I’ve never been happy with the results. Any tips?
I was a student in Brighton from 2000-2005 (and lived there for a few more years afterwards) and I was lucky to enjoy the peak of the breakbeat scene there at the time. Regular Wednesday nights at a small club called “Audio” which probably isn’t there any more, seeing Krafty Kuts, Plump DJs, Stanton Warriors, Hybrid, Adam Freeland, Way out West, A-Skillz, Soul of Man and many others on a very regular basis. It was pretty much A-List breaks every week.
Met my wife at a Stanton Warriors gig and she’s still here 17 years later!
Very much a formative stage of my life in terms of music taste. Great to see that this stuff still gets people excited. I still listen to a lot of this stuff now after 20 years.
For anyone interested, I was having a look at the Sasha expansion for Maschine and it turns out there’s a couple of kits and patterns that are in the prog breaks style. Good for deconstructing and learning.
I find the best way to get that type of sound is a pair of oscillators (pulse or saw-square gives that cool hollow sound, saw gives you more of a dnb reese bass) detuned +/- 5 to 10 cents, into a band pass filter with a low resonance and a bit of drive.
I’d use a fast envelope to drop the cutoff and bring it back up, and if possible a second envelope to slowly close the cutoff again (only a bit)
Unison is absolutely wonderful for adding the extra phasey harmonics and width, and I would personally add an extra bit of post filter drive, remove some of the extreme highs and fairly aggressively cut all the low end out to layer up a sub.
Another great effect for width on the mids is to delay the left or right of the signal by a few ms
(Not sure if that’s any more than you already know, and hybrid are next level in their production so I’m not going to even pretend I could get that close to their sounds!)
