"four to the floor"... my obsession.

[Edward]

this is an interesting thread.

some of the most minimal techno from the mid 90s era was kind of "1 to the floor" - it repeats every beat, not every 4 beats. that really is the most basic beat you can have. you can call it 4/4 but really it is just thump thump thump forever.

personally I spent a lot of time trying to stay away from making and DJing 4/4 music but now I feel that it's useful. how can i put it into words? it's like a white background... i feel that you need a punchy drum beat for dance music, and i like funky electro beats or breakbeats but sometimes you don't want the drums to distract from the other sounds, bass etc, so a 4/4 is the only choice in that it does the job of pinning you to the dancefloor without taking up all your attention.

sometimes i feel quite inarticulate, anyone get what i mean?

i think the opening example of erasure is a good one (not that i am a fan of them) because their music is all about melody and songs, but with a dancey beat. If they had used a complicated drum pattern there wouldn't be room for all the interlocking synth parts and vocals.

 

[bassnation]

sometimes i feel quite inarticulate, anyone get what i mean?

yes, perfectly - depends what you are aiming for - sometimes a basic rhythm serves to highlight the complexity of the melody, or the texture of the sounds. when you think about jungle, the rhythm is the melody with the bass providing the rhytythm or pace (at least the older stuff, anyway) so it makes sense for the rhythm to be right up front.

 

[IdleRich]

"Also, as you suggest, 4ttf can function to give a basic rhythmic drive to the tune without distracting you from everything else, and to my mind this is a perfectly valid function"

"it's like a white background... i feel that you need a punchy drum beat for dance music, and i like funky electro beats or breakbeats but sometimes you don't want the drums to distract from the other sounds, bass etc, so a 4/4 is the only choice in that it does the job of pinning you to the dancefloor without taking up all your attention."

I think that you're both saying something pretty similar here if I'm understanding you properly.

 

[Troy]

Thanks for all the great comments...especially Borderpolice, Hamarplazt, and Bassnation... really enjoying this.

With regards to beat-science, I think some artists put as much science into their 4/4 as jungle producers do in their Amen mash-ups. The detail is in the sound of the kick, how you get that sound, what sources you use, what effects you use, the atmosphere. But more importantly is what happens between the beats... how the hi-hats are used and where they are placed, where the sub-bass noises go, etc... I mean Jazz swings to a 4/4 beat but it is all in how you get from one to the next.

And with regards to some of Borderpolice’s claims that 4/4 is boring or that “the 4/4 beat is so simple and so predictable that the brain ignores it”, I have to disagree. Maybe if you listen to it as background then that is so, but I find that I eagerly anticipate each and every beat, and spend the quarter-second between each beat eagerly anticipating and being totally goosed by the next one.

(Like some have noted, 4/4 may be the wrong term since I am talking about the kick on every beat and don’t care about the length of the bar, though I can’t recall ever hearing much 3/4 or 5/4 techno.... And on the same note, I prefer it without the snare on the 2 and 4. The snare transforms the beat into more of a rock/disco beat and makes it more pop-dancey and less trancy)

 

[Vietgrove]

(Like some have noted, 4/4 may be the wrong term since I am talking about the kick on every beat and don’t care about the length of the bar, though I can’t recall ever hearing much 3/4 or 5/4 techno.... And on the same note, I prefer it without the snare on the 2 and 4. The snare transforms the beat into more of a rock/disco beat and makes it more pop-dancey and less trancy)

4/4 refers to the meter, or, I guess the bar length - the upper 4 refers to the number of beats in the bar, the lower refers to the length of those beats, 2/4 = march time, 3/4 is waltz time. I can't recall any club music using any meter other than 4/4, although a lot of happy hardcore I (inadvertently) hear coming out of radgie cars does, rather comically, have that "oom-pah, oom-pah" 2/4 march time feel to it. "four on the floor" refers to that specific beat, the kick hitting on every quarter note. I just admit that at some point during the nineties it was like someone flicked a switch in my head, and just turned me off it. I can't stand hearing it, it's almost a physical sensation of revulsion for me when the fours kick in, it has to go off.

 

[Grievous Angel]

Wicked thread, lots of very interesting stuff here. Some echoes.:

This thread is a real synchronicity for me cos one of the results of me diving deep into the dubstep pool for the last couple of years is that I've been getting right back into house. There's something about 138 tracks that are so far out of the 4x4 continuum - even when they're 4x4, dubstep tunes have this strangely swung polyrthymia that is different to mnost of the tropes of techno and most though not all house - that they kind of lead you back to it. Even if it's just that dubstep refreshes your ears for the micro-funk blips of house.

So this year I've been listening to loads of minimal house - which is essentially deep house with some extra syncopation and usually isn't very minimal at all. I've finally succombed to the allure of Trentemoller for example; I can see what the hype is about now, at their best they make deeply funky, dirty glitchy tekky gear. (I got right back into house lkast May as well!)

BTW, disco's use of 4x4 was partly a development of Motown's beat, changing "four on the top" - a snare hit on every measure - to "four in the floor" - a kick on every measure. But where did Motown take "four on the top" from? I don't think it's big in jazz outside of In a Silent Way.

 

[hamarplazt]

its worth noting that the 4/4 pulse beat has been round a lot longer than house music has. disco had a prominent kick drum back in the 70's and that was (mostly) played on real instruments.

Indeed, there's nothing new in using fttf-beats, isn't it the foundation of polka too? However, in disco and polka and so on, there's a lot of other things going on, lots of melodic stuff. The question for me is: why can I listen to something that is allmost nothing but fttf bass drum and still enjoy it? Why am I not immediately annoyed by the overbearing way it's used in gabber or minimal techno? Why am I much less bored by a solo drum machine than by a live solo drummer? Somehow the drum machine has something that a drummer doesn't, something that counterbalance its lack of variation and detail.
That said, I agree about too much of anything, especially when we're talking electronic dance music, and especially when we're talking stylens in late, template-driven stages of their evolution. A whole night of minimal techno, speedcore gabber or post-techstep drum'n'bass sounds like a nightmare to me. However, in the first thirty minutes or so, I'd probably be deeply overwhelmed by the physical impact of it.

also from a production angle, each kickdrum is not equal. producers go to great lengths to un-quantise beats (you probably all know this already, but this means ensuring that each beat does not fall rigidly on the quarter of a bar). on top of that people typically add varying amounts of reverb on to certain beats. something that sounds flatly metronomic in fact is not consistent and deliberately so. its what gives house music its hip sashaying swing.

It's true that some producers go very much into detail with every beat, but I don't think it's all that many, and further more I'd say they're often the ones making the least interesting machine music. Trying to soften the blow of sequenced rigidity, making it "organic" or "human", have allways seemed like such a ridiculous idea to me. You should use machines to make things humans can't, otherwise the technophobes are right - why painstakingly imitate what humans do much better anyway?
Also: if you just un-quantise the beats in a single bar, and then repeat that bar again and again, the result is still metronomic and machinic. I think this is why breakbeat, in spite of using samples of real live drums, also strikes with such an unusual impact. Again, not until technology made loops possible have anything like that existed, two bars would never be exactly the same.

 

[gek-opel]

The interesting thing about house isn't the 4 to the floor at all really, its the fact that such a solid backbone leaves so much space for hi hats (the funkiest bit of any beat) to work their magic (or sounds functioning as hi hats anyway, even if not actual real "hi hat" sounds)...

Most 138 stuff comes more from the post garage side of things, which structures the bass kick-snare interaction differently (even Anti-war Dub has oddly placed snares) whereas techno-house when its at that tempo is far less syncopated (normally more straightforwardly "banging")...

Any comment on why a lot of 4ttf stuff is seemingly slowing down nowadays? Is this just a side effect of minimal?

 

[hamarplazt]

(Like some have noted, 4/4 may be the wrong term since I am talking about the kick on every beat and don’t care about the length of the bar, though I can’t recall ever hearing much 3/4 or 5/4 techno....

For the most minimal forms of techno - what edward called "1 to the floor" - you could argue that there isn't a time signature at all! Still, when programming a drum machine like the 909 or 808, you'll usually get snare/clap/hi hat-patterns clearly creating a 4/4-signature, simply because that's how the machine works.

(Eventually, I've made some tracks in 3/4, but they're probably electro rather than techno. Not that there's much electro in 3/4 either, I guess).

 

[gek-opel]

Not 3/4 per bar... Schaeffel is obviously a really fast 6/8...

 

[tate]

Schaeffel is obviously a really fast 6/8...

No, it is not. This mistake is repeated over and over in the music press and begins to drive a person crazy. There is not a single track on Schaffelfieber 2, for example, in 6/8 or 3/4. Period. It is all 4/4.

As for the source: not in T Rex's "Hot Love," not in Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll Pt. 2", is there a 6/8 or 3/4 time signature.

Sure, yes, absolutely all of those tracks have a swing that characterizes the "schaffel" feel, and and for that reason one can easily superimpose triplets* over the beat (hence the delusion that one is dealing with groups of threes), but all aforementioned tracks are in 4/4 time. In other words, the measures begin after loops of four or eight, the downbeats always occur in groupings of four, not groupings of 3 or 6.

This is not subjective, btw, just music 101 or whatever.

*Michael Mayer's "Love is Stronger Than Pride" makes the triplets explicit, but the measures are still grouped according to fours. "Unter Null" works in the same way.

Waltzes are "obviously" in 3/4.

As for dnb, Blame's "Between Worlds" was an example of 3/4.

 

[Tim F]

Yeah schaffel is very much in 4/4.

If people want to hear examples of microhousey stuff in odd time signatures try Coloma's second album. And Jake Fairley's "Motor" was in 3/4 I think.

 

[minikomi]

yes, perfectly - depends what you are aiming for - sometimes a basic rhythm serves to highlight the complexity of the melody, or the texture of the sounds. when you think about jungle, the rhythm is the melody with the bass providing the rhytythm or pace (at least the older stuff, anyway) so it makes sense for the rhythm to be right up front.

or g funk where the rhythm is the bass and the bass is the trebel

 

[gek-opel]

Hmmm- I've tried to write schaffel- it is basically 4/4, true, 4 beats to a bar however in order to get the "skipping" sound each beat contains (if I recall) 3 beats, so you could perhaps describe it as a very fast 6/8 (that's what I set it up on my sequencer as anyway- at some ridiculous bpm like 300 or something) or a 4/4 in triplet time?

Yr right in that it is perceived very much as a straightforward 4x4 tho. (the bass kick snare interaction certainly implies that)

Are there any problems in mixing straight 4/4 into schaffel? Presumably not with the actual kicks, but with the hi hats?

 

[Tim F]

Yeah most of the time when schaffel is mixed with a straight 4X4 tune the hi-hats drop off for a moment.

Mayer's "Love Is Stronger Than Pride" is actually a good track to mix in and out of schaffel with because it doesn't have the hi-hats, just the beat, the triplets, and what sounds like an occasional white noise rip. And lo and behold I can think of about ten instances when i've heard it being used in that fashion.

Then there's tracks that go back and forth b/w schaffel and 4X4, like T. Raumschmiere's mix of Dave Gahan's "Bottle Living", or the Black Strobe mix of Cosmo Vitelli's "Robot Soul".

On the issue of the ignorability of the 4X4 beat, here's something I wrote on ILM about this:

"I often think about a post Josh Kortbein wrote on his blog about how he couldn't remember the moment when he got used to house beat, but somehow it had quietly gone from seeming oppressive, rhythmically authoritarian, to seeming quite natural, almost inaudible in its familiarity (and this is only about a year or two after we'd had a bit of back-and-forth where he'd complained of exactly that) - in some senses the dance music fan doesn't actually hear the house beat at all, just what a particular track does with it - in the same way that when you're reading you don't necessarily stop and take notice of the fact that you're looking at the letters "a", "b", "c" etc., but you will notice if they're written in an interesting font."

 

[zhao]

doesn't actually hear the house beat at all, just what a particular track does with it "

ah yes the famous "frog's eye view" - where constant stiumuli dissapears and only changes are preceived.

 

[Edward]

especially[/I] when we're talking stylens in late, template-driven stages of their evolution....

I love this, it sums up whole conversations I have had....

It has some bearing on the "grime / what went wrong?" thread and indeed it is exactly what goes wrong with almost every type of music once it has a name.

 

[Troy]

feeding the obsession

been hitting the used record stores 'round here the last week or so. Picked up...

Ritchie Hawtin - DE9 Transitions
Dave Seaman - Master Series 7
Timo Maas - Connected
Seb Fontaine - Prototype 3
John Digweed - Fabric 20
Hernan Cattaneo - Master Series 1
Josh Wink - Profound Sounds 3
Donaldson/DeSardi - San Francisco Sessions 5

Only one not too hyped about is the last one. How do I tell my 2 year old daughter that her pop dropped 80 dollars on house music instead of buying her new shoes?

 

[zhao]

How do I tell my 2 year old daughter that her pop dropped 80 dollars on house music instead of buying her new shoes?

and not even very good house music in-my-humble-but-stuck-up-opinion.

save some money and illegal download (your daughter needs shoes).

loads of 4/4 stuff on these blogs ( lots of crap but sometimes tiptop albums from Kompakt, Perlon, Playhouse, etc.)

http://sickmix.blogspot.com/

http://linkset.blogspot.com/