The structure of drum and bass;djtutor.com 20th Jan 07

0:00 I suppose one of my modern

G'day folks, today we're going to look at I suppose one of my modern day favourite types of music. Modern day being of course from very late 80s, early 90s, originally known as jungle, now more commonly known as drum and bass. This is cool. Check this out. Start it off properly. By the way, this particular track, because everyone's been asking me about the tracks I'm playing, this is The Gangster Crew. And Super Sharp Shooter. DJ Hype presents. Now what I did actually say in an earlier video, and that is drum and bass basically is almost half the speed of hip-hop. So the reason I picked this particular track is because the beginning is exactly like hip-hop but then the beat, the tempo is identical, it's just almost doubled in beat. What they're actually doing is they're not increasing the speed as such.

1:28 What is drum and bass?

If you listen to this, you can imagine now a hip hop track. So now, I mean let's face it, let's be honest, if you had a hip hop track, you could mix the beginning of this into a hip hop track, couldn't you? Goes through like so. Okay, what is drum and bass? Basically, drum and bass is exactly what it says on the tin. It's drum as in beats and bass. The bass, if we go back, the bass is that wah-wah-wah sound that you can hear. That's the bass. And then we go onto the break. And we'll go from hip-hop to drum and bass. Check it out. Here you go, drum and bass. Now in a lot of drum and bass what you actually have is what's known as a breakbeat, which is basically the sound you can hear, which is the hi-hat, snare, funky beat. Again, like with a lot of types of house music, 4-4 beats are split up into different categories. You have garage, you have house, funky house, euro house, etc.

2:50 Drum and bass is not dissimilar

Drum and bass is not dissimilar. You have funky drum and bass, you have liquid, you have dreamy drum and bass, you have hard drum and bass. I class this as pretty funky. And again, if we go through the record, we have shiny bits where there's breaks. Here you go. But even at that point there, okay, we're going to count the bars, all right? Listen. One, one, two, three, two, one, two, three, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, one, one, two, three, two, one, two, three, three, one, two, three, four, one, two, three. Okay, so even in the breaks, we can still count bars. Go through it. Not much difference with this one, basically straightforward all the way through, but it's damn good. And this is the sort of stuff when you're here on a good PA, you don't have to rock the speakers. Okay, so again, what is drum and bass? It's exactly what it says on the tin, it's drum. Nine times out of ten, a very funky beat with lots of hi-hat, lots of snare, lots of cymbal, top end, and then a bass line, a good deep bass line.

That is my interpretation of drum and bass. Enjoy.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.