The History of Dubstep
I'm pretty certain by now everybody has heard at least one dubstep song or if you haven't you despise the genre and i don't see why you are reading this. Anyway, seeing as the genre has reached it's "all time high" a lot of people would like to know where it came from and who made it. so to answer those questions i have decided to do the research for you.
The first known dubstep track's were released in the late 1990's. These tracks were significantly different to the tracks we know today, they were darker and more experimental. Of course with recent years we wouldn't recognize the first few dubstep tracks as dubstep but would relate them more relate as drum & bass. Certain dubstep tracks also inherited certain features from reggae and includes a short piano stab or guitar strum on the off beat, this gave the song a nice chilled out vibe. A good reference of this would be Skrillex & Damian "jr Gong" Marley: Make It Bun Dem
At the start you can clearly hear the iconic reggae stab.
Of course Dubstep has been around years but only recently has it begun to show in popular music, one example would be the advertisements that are on the TV, lots of adverts seem to have up-tempo dubstep tracks playing in the back ground. This uptempo beat is normally a modified version of a typical D&B drum beat. Drum and Bass has a tempo of 160-180 where as dubstep has 140-150, so a small difference but the drums are almost identical, the only difference usually being is the snare on dubstep is on the 3rd beat not the 2nd and 4th.
The structure of a dubstep track usually goes as follows: Intro, Buildup, Drop 1, Varied Version of Buildup, Drop 2, Outro.
This structure is usually made up of bars of 16, certain songs may be different but this seems to be the key. Examples of this are everywhere, if a song is at a tempo of 140 and as 32 bars then drops, it's usually on 52 seconds for the drop to hit.
Drums in dubstep now are usually the same, a few kicks and snare on the 3rd beat of the bar, however before this was a common feature of dubstep the drums seemed to take influence from 2-step garage which would syncopate the drums and variate them drastically.
Not only were the drums inherited from 2-step but also certain 2-step songs seemed to have an element of the classic "wobble bass" . These two examples prove my point, most people would mistake them as being dubstep now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsOVED4u8aI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo5aUjBX9WI
FM synthesis has become a huge part of the dubstep scene, almost every single one of skrillex's, Kill the noises and even flux pavilion's songs seem to have a huge screechy FM synth that blasts everybody away, of course FM synthesis wasn't originally intended to be used for this, it was just another way of making sound but there was a whole lot more to it as you could create massively complex sounds with it, this is why dubstep artists seem to use it so much, because there is so much you can do with it.
Here is a brilliant tutorial which explains and also teaches FM synthesis usage in dubstep
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b2mKauAbhU
Certain Bands and artists didn't start out doing dubstep, for instance, Skrillex wasn't originally doing dubstep. The start of his musical career was in a "emo" band called "From First To Last" as a singer but he also went to old school electronic raves which influenced his music later on in life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a4C_SxvITk (From first to last - Note To Self)
Of course music hasn't always been this technologically advanced, for instance, there was a time where we used vinyls not CD's and CD's not MP3 and WAV's and although they're less popular with the audience some artists do release their track on Vinyls. I think this is because many DJ's still prefer using vinyl to mix as they think that MP3's and CD's do not sound as clear as the classic vinyl. Of course DJ's still have ways of using MP3's, like the Traktor that native instruments brought out, it's a brilliant way of home DJing that can be take professionally. Ableton Live seems to be the top way that producers play their music at gigs because you can constantly change it and mash it up with certain midi controllers like an MPC or launchpad.
The first known dubstep track's were released in the late 1990's. These tracks were significantly different to the tracks we know today, they were darker and more experimental. Of course with recent years we wouldn't recognize the first few dubstep tracks as dubstep but would relate them more relate as drum & bass. Certain dubstep tracks also inherited certain features from reggae and includes a short piano stab or guitar strum on the off beat, this gave the song a nice chilled out vibe. A good reference of this would be Skrillex & Damian "jr Gong" Marley: Make It Bun Dem
At the start you can clearly hear the iconic reggae stab.
Of course Dubstep has been around years but only recently has it begun to show in popular music, one example would be the advertisements that are on the TV, lots of adverts seem to have up-tempo dubstep tracks playing in the back ground. This uptempo beat is normally a modified version of a typical D&B drum beat. Drum and Bass has a tempo of 160-180 where as dubstep has 140-150, so a small difference but the drums are almost identical, the only difference usually being is the snare on dubstep is on the 3rd beat not the 2nd and 4th.
The structure of a dubstep track usually goes as follows: Intro, Buildup, Drop 1, Varied Version of Buildup, Drop 2, Outro.
This structure is usually made up of bars of 16, certain songs may be different but this seems to be the key. Examples of this are everywhere, if a song is at a tempo of 140 and as 32 bars then drops, it's usually on 52 seconds for the drop to hit.
Drums in dubstep now are usually the same, a few kicks and snare on the 3rd beat of the bar, however before this was a common feature of dubstep the drums seemed to take influence from 2-step garage which would syncopate the drums and variate them drastically.
Not only were the drums inherited from 2-step but also certain 2-step songs seemed to have an element of the classic "wobble bass" . These two examples prove my point, most people would mistake them as being dubstep now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsOVED4u8aI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo5aUjBX9WI
FM synthesis has become a huge part of the dubstep scene, almost every single one of skrillex's, Kill the noises and even flux pavilion's songs seem to have a huge screechy FM synth that blasts everybody away, of course FM synthesis wasn't originally intended to be used for this, it was just another way of making sound but there was a whole lot more to it as you could create massively complex sounds with it, this is why dubstep artists seem to use it so much, because there is so much you can do with it.
Here is a brilliant tutorial which explains and also teaches FM synthesis usage in dubstep
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b2mKauAbhU
Certain Bands and artists didn't start out doing dubstep, for instance, Skrillex wasn't originally doing dubstep. The start of his musical career was in a "emo" band called "From First To Last" as a singer but he also went to old school electronic raves which influenced his music later on in life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a4C_SxvITk (From first to last - Note To Self)
Of course music hasn't always been this technologically advanced, for instance, there was a time where we used vinyls not CD's and CD's not MP3 and WAV's and although they're less popular with the audience some artists do release their track on Vinyls. I think this is because many DJ's still prefer using vinyl to mix as they think that MP3's and CD's do not sound as clear as the classic vinyl. Of course DJ's still have ways of using MP3's, like the Traktor that native instruments brought out, it's a brilliant way of home DJing that can be take professionally. Ableton Live seems to be the top way that producers play their music at gigs because you can constantly change it and mash it up with certain midi controllers like an MPC or launchpad.
