Old school hardcore, broken down

What this lesson teaches

The shortest and least technical lesson in the course, and it belongs here as the exception that tests the rule.

Where it came from

Late eighties and early nineties, and his account of why is the interesting part: it was a bedroom producer revolution.

Computers had become cheap enough that people could make records at home, and the response to an industry that was not interested was to stop waiting for it. House and hip-hop already existed; the raves were starting; and what came out was made by people with no training, no studio and no particular respect for how records were supposed to be put together.

The structure

His description: basically, it's all over the place.

Breakbeat, drum and bass and hardcore were, at that point, not yet separate things. They were one messy category that people then took in their own directions - which is how the genres we have now came about.

Why this is worth a lesson

Everything else in this course teaches you that dance music is regular, built in fours and eights and sixteens, and that counting therefore predicts the future. That is true and it is extremely useful.

This is the reminder that it is a convention rather than a law.

Music made before the convention settled - and music made by people deliberately ignoring it - does not count neatly. A sixteen-bar expectation will be wrong. The structure has to be learned record by record, by listening, rather than deduced.

And the general principle that falls out of it: the more a genre was made on machines, the more reliably you can count it. Drum machines and sequencers impose regularity; people with samplers and no rules do not.

So when something refuses to behave the way this course says it should, check when and how it was made before assuming you miscounted.