I recently realized the answer to the
question nobody ever asks: What makes drum and bass drum and bass?
I came back to SL after a long time not
in the world. I had always loved djing when I was in-world, but I
never much did anything else. And now I know why. After playing tons
of games between then and now, I finally realized how lame SL looked
when I played it back then. The animations were just so bad. Of
course, I had never learned anything back then about AOs, I just came
in, djed for 2-3 hours, and then left. This time when I came back, I
knew about animations so I got a better walk, run, fly, you know. And
I have been using those as-was for a couple of months now. But
something still wasn't right...
Until yesterday, when I finally
succeeded in making a walking sound script work. What I had been
missing all this time was the walking sound!
Ok, so drum and bass. Or more
specifically, the drum and bass beat. Put simply, the drum and bass
beat, every drum and bass beat, is the Amen break (or some variant)
from a 1969 song by the Winstons called "Amen Brother."
From Wikipedia:
The Amen break is a 6
to 7 second (4 bar) drum solo performed in 1969 by Gregory Cylvester
"G. C." Coleman in the song "Amen, Brother"
performed by the 1960s funk and soul outfit The Winstons. The full
song is an up-tempo instrumental rendition of Jester Hairston's
"Amen," which he wrote for the Sidney Poitier film Lilies
of the Field (1963) and which was subsequently popularized by The
Impressions in 1964. The Winstons' version was released as a B-side
of the 45 RPM 7-inch vinyl single "Color Him Father" in
1969 on Metromedia (MMS-117), and is currently available on several
compilations and on a 12-inch vinyl re-release together with other
songs by The Winstons.
It gained fame from
the 1980s onwards when four bars (6 seconds) sampled from the
drum-solo (or imitations thereof) became very widely used as sampled
drum loops in breakbeat, hip hop, breakbeat hardcore, hardcore techno
and breakcore, drum and bass (including oldschool jungle and ragga
jungle), and digital hardcore music. The Amen Break was used
extensively in early hiphop and sample-based music, and became the
basis for drum-and-bass and jungle music—"a six-second clip
that spawned several entire subcultures." It is one of the most
sampled loops in contemporary electronic music and arguably the most
sampled drum beat of all time.
Note that the original Amen break was
itself part of a remix of sorts. For a fascinating history of the
Amen break, see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaFTm2bcac
So what is the connection between the
missing walking sound and drum and bass? People think that drum and
bass is about exactly that, the drums and the bass. Technically, this
is true. But every type of music has a drum and a bass in it, so what
makes this particular type of music take on the name itself, "drum
and bass?"
Quite simply, it's the hi-hat shuffle
played at 170 beats per minute. The hat shuffle is why the first
person to sample the Amen break did it. It's what makes you bob your
head and dance. And the shuffle is on an upbeat, so that as you count
out a song, the hits of the hats come after the main downbeat counts.
Something like 1 da-da-DA-da, 2 da-da-DA-da and so on.
But I get ahead of myself. A basic drum
and bass beat is composed of a kick, a snare and the hats. The length
of a basic loop is 16 beats, so count to 16 at the speed of 170 beats
per minute (remember your basic physics: distance (d) = rate (r) x
time (t) so rate = d/t if you want to know how fast that is). The
bass plays on the 1 and 11 beats, and the snare plays on the 5 and 13
beats. These two alone make a beat that is surely recognizable as
drum and bass, but still something isn't right. Something is missing.
The little shuffle sound of the hats. The hat shuffle, in its various
incarnations, is what makes drum and bass drum and bass.
Further reading:
DnB HiHat explained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sclVMvTHlmk
A good history of drum and bass:
For a scholarly treatise on drum and
bass:
http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_03/pdf/quinn.pdf