# UK Garage

UK garage is my favourite electronic dance music genre.

It got its start in underground clubs and pirate radio stations in
England in the 1990s, with many small releases on 12" vinyl
being distributed in independent record shops.

It involves heavy use of sampled vocal lines which are chopped
up, stretched, re-pitched, and manipulated (often sampled
illegally, or "bootlegged", from old house and RnB).

The main driving melody of the track is a low-frequency
bassline, that you can feel deep in your bones.  Basslines were
often sampled from oldskool jungle tunes.

Dark, heavy basslines. Euphoric vocals. That's the contrast
that defines UK Garage music.

UK Garage could not exist in a world of strict copyright
enforcement.  Due to this, the dominant platforms to find
original UKG are YouTube and obscure file-sharing networks
like Soulseek.

## Drum patterns

Despite what anyone says, electronic dance music genres are
defined by the drum pattern. If the drum pattern doesn't match,
the DJ can't mix the tracks, so it's essentially the foundation
of the music.  All garage is around 128 to 140 beats per minute
- slower than drum and bass, faster than house.

Four-to-the-floor garage ("speed garage, "bassline", "4x4") has a
house drum pattern: four kick drums per bar, claps or snares 
on the 2nd and 4th kick, open hi-hats on the offbeat.
Speed garage beats often have "ghost" snares or claps
on the off-beat to spice things up, especially around the 
4th/8th beat of every bar.

2-step garage is the stuff that went mainstream in the early
2000s - Artful Dodger and Craig David and that.
Compared to speed garage, snares are locked at the 2nd
and 4th, but the kicks are more irregular and infrequent.
This gives 2-step tracks a slower feel, despite having
more in common with drum and bass than house.

Speed garage is more popular in the North of England
and the Midlands, 2-step garage in London and the south-east.

## Trotters Independent Traders

Trotters Independent Traders is pretty interesting as
far as early British house music goes.

Neil Rumney ("Mr. Trotters") started out as a UK Hardcore
producer, so his productions make excessive use of 
pitched vocal chops, sudden switches in the drum pattern,
and they're also very bass driven.

To those in the know, the early Trotters releases are the
origins of the speed garage scene, but that's not really
what it says in popular histories or on Wikipedia. The
earliest Trotters releases came out around 1993.

"Lonely People" is my favorite Trotters track. It's like if
the Beatles were into heavy bass and MDMA, instead of
soft rock and LSD.

## Big Ang

After the 90s, speed garage was essentially dead, with
no new releases, but in the North of England and the Midlands
there was still a strong demand for tunes to be played at
clubs like Subway City, Niche, Boilerhouse, and Casa Locos.

The DJs had to be skilled crate-diggers, finding obscure
speed garage records that never saw the light of day.

Big Ang from Sheffield was essentially responsible for
reviving speed garage in the early 2000s.  Listen to
tracks from her like "XTC Love".

New skool, less sample-driven speed garage is often called
"bassline house", or simply bassline.

## Future Garage

Future Garage is interesting because it takes UK Garage out
of the rave environment that spawned it, instead being geared
towards listening at home, or on headphones on a lonely
night-time bus ride.

Burial is probably the originator of this style, and he
spent a lot of time drifting around London at night.
His early EP "South London Boroughs" sounded like nothing
that had come before.

He takes sampling to the extreme, using 'drums' that are actually
the sounds of bullets falling in old video games. Everything
is layered with reverb and echo effects, making the tracks seeem
worn and distant. Every sample is placed by hand on a waveform,
making the drum patterns very uneven.

My favorite 'future garage' artist is Submerse, who makes
beautiful emotional tracks that are still actually pretty danceable.

## Dubstep

Dubstep is the one everyone knows.

Early dubstep tracks were essentially dub reggae fans trying to
make 2-step garage. The snare was in the "wrong place", matching
a reggae drum pattern.  Many of the more euphoric "girly" elements
of Garage were modified or removed, making the genre suited to
moody boys in dark clubs filled with weed smoke.

While early dubstep was more appealing to fans of reggae, later
dubstep appealed to teenage metalheads in much the same way
as Pendulum, by moving away from sub-bass towards synthesizer
lines more reminiscent of an electric guitar (mid frequency).

Allegedly, the initial evolution happened because of a smoking ban
in UK clubs - with the weed removed, DJs had to fight to keep
ravers' attention.  It also makes for easier listening on
cheap laptop speakers and earbuds, which can't accurately
reproduce sub bass.

One of the earliest dubstep tracks was Horsepower Productions -
Gorgon Sound.  Listen to early sets by Benga, as well.

## Making UK Garage

If you're interested in making UK garage, I'd recommend learning
to mix first.  It gives you a feeling for why tracks are structured
in the way they are, with long intros/outros and breakdowns existing
for the DJ to use for their advantage.

Listen to drum and bass, house, early RnB and reggae.  Anything you
can draw from - UK garage is a composite of other sounds, so it's
good to draw from a variety of sources for inspiration.

A lot of underground UKG is made by producers without classical
musical training.

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