grudge wrote:To get a little bit theoretical here. here goes my understanding of essentially what makes dubstep sound the way it does and how we should define music as "dubstep". My definition as to what comprises of dubstep is playing any combination of sounds layered together and then modulating certain parameters including BPM, to account for why dubstep sounds the way it does, as it reflects a million different sounds resampled back ontop of each other over and over at varying tempos which are recorded as a set of moment in time sounds and then layered together in ceratin pattern combinations to make any resulting music to the the idea that all new future forms of music will be further dubstep offshoots . The only defining characteristic that these new forms of music will be a general BPM range and eventaully give up on specific names or substypes of dubstep as it will eventually encompass a much wider tempo range ranging from 0 BPM to infinite.The final points in the recordings at which you take the specific samples are determined but theier assigned parameters and the resulting noise is the result of enless of sounds being folder over each other. To use an an analogy it is like the concept of a Katana where the metal is bent back and forth and back and forth and each time it becomes sharper, so to with a sound can it be quantified. You could then essentially layer one sound over and over with a few variations at different points in the tempo and it would completely determine the structure of the track itself by those changes made to the programming settings.
Anyone think Im right out to lunch or else how to explain the dubstep offshoots(its like the dubstep of dubstep if ya get what i mean)?
Dude, what the fuck are you talking about? Have you been smoking all the wrong things?
I'm actually gonna have a go at answering this, though I'll admit I can't really find anything in your post to draw on as none of it makes any sense whatsoever.
First off, as a caveat, pidgeonholing is wack in general. It breeds complacency, unadventurous producers, boring music. Nonetheless, fitting things into genres is not *necessarily* an evil, only the compulsion to fit *everything* into a genre even when it's inappropriate to do so. In the case of dubstep, it's definitely possible to draw dotted lines around the sound encompassing the MAJORITY of tracks in the genre. Part of the reason this is possible with dubstep - although rapidly it's becoming no longer the case - is that at the time of its emergence it had a sound that was comparatively set apart from everything else in existence at the time. Contrast with this the innumerable genre arguments of "is this house" or "is this techno" or "is this disco" -- all of which have such ambiguous definitions that it's almost impossible to distinguish particular tracks from sound alone, having instead to resort to prior knowledge of who made it, what they'd made before, what DJs are playing it, and so forth - and you'll see what I mean. This is where things start getting futile. With dubstep, I feel like this is not *quite* yet the case -- of course, the subsequent crossovers with techno, 2-step and, more recently, deep house (who'd have thought?) have made the task of sound-defining increasingly pointless, and soon it'll be entirely so. However, in 2010, as an academic exercise I think it's still possible to draw up a set of key features, that knowledgeable listeners would agree "sum up the essence of 90% of dubstep" without unnecessarily restricting its scope.
(The remaining 10% (or less) is generally lumped in with the rest by association - eg such-and-such track is dubstep because loads of dubstep guys are caning it, even though it sounds nothing like the rest of what's usually recognized as dubstep. Of this minority of tracks, some belong to the scene because they're nostalgic classics from another era and genre, tracks that just "happen to work", or whatever. The very small remainder are examples of innovation in the field, people pushing the sound in directions never before tread.)
With that in mind, I would say that with the exception of the latter 10% (which frankly is the most interesting, but whatever), the primary defining features of dubstep are, in the majority of cases:
- A tempo of roughly 140 BPM, or 70 BPM if you've taken too much ket
- More often than not, the rhythm is either:
* Half-step, so 70bpm with snare on 2 and 4
* Skittery 140 bpm with a broken beat; in this case the emphasis tends NOT to be on the backbeat or it just sounds like breaks
- Rhythmic divisions of 16th notes (often swung) at 140BPM - so the 70 BPM stuff actually sounds like halftime 140 rather than slow, dirgey 70
- Heavy emphasis on sub-bass (I guess this could be an issue of contention - there's plenty of really shitty trancey dubstep out there with very little bass, which I'd argue is pretty much dubstep but without any of the things that make it enjoyable)
Everything else is just embellishment. For example I absolutely do not think that wobble bass, any kind of vocal samples, any specific kind of percussion or any specific production techniques are as integral to the dubstep sound as the above points. And, as I said above, IMHO the most interesting material is the stuff that is clearly, inarguably dubstep but with few or none of the above crutches.
On a tangent: WHO do you think fits into the minority category? Right now?
