3:56
UK speed garage, broken down
On YouTube this video is called Looking at UK Speed Garage, djtutor.com Jan 20th 07
What this lesson teaches
His breakdown of UK speed garage, with a preference stated and defended.
Two kinds
The 4/4 sort, with a chugging bassline, not far from house.
The breakbeat sort, where the drums are broken rather than four to the floor.
He is blunt that he does not care for the second kind, and equally clear that this is personal taste rather than a judgement - he rates the hard-hitting bassline version a ten and the other a one, and says so as an opinion.
Easy to count
Like the other machine-made genres, it is very formatted and the bars are easy to count. There are usually few vocals; where a speed garage record reaches the charts, a female vocal has often been added over the top afterwards, which he notes drily.
The observation worth keeping
Here is the structural point, and it has a direct consequence for how you mix this music.
In speed garage, the bassline is often doing two jobs at once. It is the bassline, and it is also carrying the melodic content - there is no separate tune sitting above it in the mids.
That changes the standard mixing move. The usual technique during an overlap is to pull the bass out of one record so there is only one bassline; harmless, because the melody lives in the mids and survives.
Do that to a speed garage record and you remove the tune as well. What is left is drums and not much else, and the track you were trying to keep alive has gone quiet in a way you did not intend.
So with this music the bass swap has to be quicker and more decisive - you are handing over the whole character of the record, not just its bottom end.
Why genres get their own lessons
This is the answer to anyone wondering why a structure course needs one video per style. The counting never changes. What changes is where the information lives in the frequency range, and that decides which EQ moves are available to you.
Contents of the video
0:00 Hopefully you can hear me
Alright folks, this is my interpretation and my breakdown of a type of music called speed garage. Okay, hold on. Hopefully you can hear me. Yeah, you can hear me. Right, two types of speed garage. There's that chugging 4-4 bassline speed garage, quite, well not dissimilar to house music. Then there's the other one which is like a breakbeat sort of speed garage. The track that was in that format was that Sweet Light Chocolate which said... Which I don't particularly like, it's my own preference, I don't particularly like that type of speed garage because there's basically not much to it. But this type is from a scale of 1, meaning I don't like it, this is number 10 because it's got hard hitting, similar sort of bass line type to the drum and bass stuff. So again what we'll do, we'll show it on.
1:09 There's that bass line
Very formatted again, you can count bars very easily with this. Everything's broken up. Not many vocals do this kind of stuff. Quite often what you will find, you'll have an instrumental version where they'll just take all the vocals out if there are any, and if there are some vocals... There'll be very few, and if ever a particular Speed Garage song gets into the charts, then what they'll do, they'll just wang a female vocal over it, and at least that's something to put on the video, isn't it really? Okay, so there's that bass line. You listen. Right, what happens as well, the bass line does change slightly. Okay, now instead of a melody here... The bass line is almost doing two things. It's actually taking over the melody as well, but still being the bass line. And then here we've got that break. And it gets faster and faster and faster. Right, I'm going to try and mix this next one in, OK? But I've got to slow this one down. Right, it's a good job I had that one on there. I do beg your pardon, it's just that the needle's getting a bit dodgy there.
Alright, so basically what you're looking at there, the track by the way is Mr. Spring, it's a track entitled Voyager 156, alright? So that's my interpretation and my breakdown of what is known as Speed Garage, okay? Chugging bassline, 4-4 time, very similar to house music, to the garage type of thing, the difference with Speed Garage I suppose, as opposed to Garage, Garage is slightly more mellow, more relaxed, Speed Garage, bit more hard edge. Speak to you soon. Bye-bye.
This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.
