Style
Gabber is characterized by its bass drum sound. Essentially, it comes from taking a normal synthesized bass drum and over-driving it heavily. The approximately sinusoidal sample starts to clip into a square wave with a falling pitch. This results in a number of effects: the frequency spectrum spreads out, thus achieving a louder, more aggressive sound. It also changes the amplitude envelope of the sound by increasing the sustain. Due to the distortion, the drum also develops a melodic tone. It is not uncommon for the bass drum pattern to change pitch throughout the song to follow the bass line.
The second frequently used component of gabber tracks is the "hoover", a patch of the Roland Alpha Juno synthesizer. A "hoover" is typically a distorted, grainy, sweeping sound which, when played on a low key, can create a dark and brooding bass line. Alternatively, when played at higher pitches, the hoover becomes an aggressive, shrieking lead. Faster gabber tracks often apply extremely fast hoover-patterns. The use of the hoover has evolved over the years, and in Nu Style Gabber, most tracks rely on a cleaner, detuned supersaw lead, similar to trance.
The aforementioned two sub-genres of gabber differ in essentially one thing: the tempo.
- Old school gabber, staying true to its mentality, defines "hardness" in speed; tracks rarely go under 180 BPM, and bass drum rolls often go up to a speed where the beats themselves are hardly distinguishable from each other.
- Mainstream hardcore, formally known as Nu style gabber, slows the speed down, but extends the length of the bass drum so the bass-frequency resonance keeps on longer. In this aspect, this new form of gabber obviously cannot be considered less powerful than its precursor. Often melodic, the beats are divided into triplets and synth notes are played in a short, staccato-like fashion, giving the song a march-like feel.
- Industrial hardcore influenced by industrial music, characterized by harsh beats. This style is closely related to Mainstream hardcore.
Read more about this topic: Gabber
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one’s own, it is always twenty times better.”
—Margaret Oliphant (1828–1897)
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“His style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. It is not literary or classical; it has not the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)