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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

> a performance by the electronic music duo Orphx

Maybe EDM fans are conditioned to react to bass sounds, the lower the frequency the better? Would be interesting to try if the same effect can be achieved with other music genres too...

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Please don't call Orphx EDM. They make techno and ambient.

Slightly related: Saw them at Labyrinth 2015 in Japan. Amazing performance.

I'm not an EDM expert, so I'll refer to the Wikipedia definition ;)

> Techno is a genre of electronic dance music (EDM) which is generally produced for use in a continuous DJ set, with tempo often varying between 120 and 150 beats per minute (bpm).

I get the instinctual response of distinguishing EDM and Techno or any genre for that matter. Yes, Techno is technically EDM. But when people talk about EDM they generally mean commercialized electronic pop-music. I think it comes from the fact, that people who not have delved deeper into what "EDM" is, mean something like Avicii (no hate) when talking about it. Since that is all they now.

The NY Times still spells DJs as "D.J.s".

(AP Stylebook fixed this in 2016, but NY Times hasn't kept up).

Isn’t edm the most general term that encompasses all these subgenres?

Old-heads like to distinguish early electronic music genres because the term EDM didn't come along until much later thus Techno and Ambient being specified.

if someone points it out I generally just say, we get it, you like neuro-funk jungle house and don't want it lumped in with other genres.

In my experience "EDM" fans will skew more towards newer genre's of electronic music.

I know this is probably some off-hand joke. But do you know some tracks that combine jungle and house? Doesn't have to be old-school jungle but just some breaky beats.

"True" jungle isn't very housey due to the heavy snares, but there's lots of housey drum & bass. Look for Hospital Records and explore out from there.

Thanks :) Hospital has been a favorite of mine for years now. Although I haven't checked out what they released in recent times.

PS: Just saw that there is a Bop x Subwave album going to be released. Kinda excited for that

I can't say I have ever heard that. This might sound weird but I think Phonk music is probably the closest you can get since Jungle and Phonk both use deep baselines and sample dub/hiphop as well as Phonk having a House-y bpm and driving bass kicks.

If you take house music and replace the drums with jungle-like off-timed rhythms but keep the same tempo, you more or less end up with electro.

Here's some recent ones I've found

Matt Mills - Cease and Desist (Original Mix)

https://commatraxx.bandcamp.com/track/a2-cease-and-desist-or...

All Night In Heaven from All Night In Heaven EP by Bushwacka!

https://bushwacka.bandcamp.com/track/all-night-in-heaven

Luca Lozano - No Rewinds from Homies At Work by Various Artists https://klassewrecks.bandcamp.com/track/no-rewinds

And an oldie that fits the bill from Grooverider:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lOvZ-1FKTMM

Great tracks - thanks!

The Break Boys - My House Is Your House [0]

Pyramid - Cruel [1]

[0] https://www.discogs.com/master/39337-The-Break-Boys-Undergro...

[1] https://www.discogs.com/release/3969233-Pyramid-5-Ft-Julie-T...

There was a bit of a trend in the UK over the last 12 to 18 months, to mix breakbeats and house. Early 90s house (particularly from Europe) used sub bass and breaks quite often before all the formulas got more settled. The trouble is the influences don’t quite match up very well between Jungle and House.

It's like bundling metal, rock, alternative, blues, country, and string quartets together as "guitar music."

Old schoolers used the term electronica as the umbrella. But eventually electronica shifted to replace "IDM" (intelligent dance music) to mean very electronica-ish music.

EDM became a term as EDM went mainstream, starting around 2010. It defines a specific range known for the commercially well-produced electro/progressive house, dubstep, & trap.

From the outside, EDM is technically correct. But for insiders, we probably just say "dance music" or "electronic music" as the umbrella.

Dubstep, not to be confused with dubstep, which sounds substantially different.

Personally I just say "electronic music" as the generic term to reference any/all sub-genres. Anything more specific falls apart quickly - even the "d" in edm implies danceability, which neglects several sub-genres.

It is most common, yes. That doesn't make it an accurate description.

Electronic music has a naming problem.

EDM is a specific subgenre of electronic music that became popular in the 2010s with Skrillex and those big mainstream American festivals.

The most general term would be 'electronic music', or 'dance music', but not 'electronic dance music'.

Similarly, if you say 'dubstep' to a person in the UK they would think of something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHRf9DNdkgY while an American would think of something terrible. (Good track for this discussion about bass, incidentally).

'Garage' is another one. Totally different genres in the UK and US.

I'll remember that the next time I talk to a soldier from the marine corps.

I wouldn't say the lower the better. A lot of bass music is written in keys around E/F since that places the root note just within the lower end of audible range. Most sound systems don't respond much below around 20 Hertz, anyway.

Bass players have long said the same thing.

I am sure I have read some colorful quotes on the topic from Bootsy Collins.

Yeah baba!

Bassist here. Oddly enough most speakers made for bass use have diminishing response below roughly 80 to 40 Hz. Mine included. There is a tradeoff between low end response and other aspects of tone quality -- depending on your preferencea of course.

One of the first tricks one learns in electronic music production (possibly also other genres) is to roll off the frequencies below 40 - 50Hz across most/all your tracks as down there it all starts to smudge together and makes your mix sound muddy. I'm guessing your bass speaker does the same for a live performance.

Indeed, that's what's happening. Now it doesn't prevent the sound tech from feeding it at full strength through the subs, turning it into a wall of mud in the audience.

I tend to high pass most tracks except for the kick and bass, but it's less about mud down at <100 Hz and more about dynamic range. When you have high amplitude low frequencies (inaudible or not) then the higher frequency content has less head room when stacked on top of that giant wave before it starts clipping. Consider how at the limit, a 0 Hz DC positive offset sounds like nothing but pushes the entire signal closer maximum sample value. In order to avoid that clipping, you have to turn everything down and now the whole track doesn't sound as loud as other comparable music, which is bad news for something you want DJs to play.

There's rarely any useful signal that low for instruments other than kick and bass anyway, so stripping those rumbles and thumps out just keeps the waveform more centered overall. That lets you increase the overall loudness without clipping.

For me, things get muddy when I have too much going on around, I don't know, 100-300 Hz. I high pass tracks to clean up the mud there. Below that, the high passing is mostly for dynamic range and loudness.

Excellent descriptions, thanks!

Hey drcongo long time no speak! But I can’t say that is the way to do it anymore.

Often you have to make sure that there is not multiple things going on down there, so you high pass a lot of the elements in a track. Then the sub of a Kick can’t be out of phase with a sub bass. You can duck one of them so they dont occur at the same time (probably still the way a lot of people do it), or you automate a high pass eq in relation to the other sound which can cause other phase issue but tends to work really well and is easy. Or you align the waveforms of the kick and the bass to match in phase and control the ducking more manually.

It also depends on the playback medium to some extent - vinyl has a slightly different set of challenges to digital.

Check this out for reference: https://youtu.be/K-eneMG_DVE

Hey Tim! I knew someone would be able to go nerdier than me, thanks for the video!

Also if you need bass on crappy speakers a poorly quantized sawtooth wave under 50 Hz can fill in the gap to an extent

Sounds like a neat trick. Why poorly quantized?

My reply is just a guess. A poorly-quantized saw wave will have “bit-crushing” artifacts at higher frequencies, which can imply the existence of a frequency that’s too low for the speaker to handle.

The video link is to a video showing bit-crushing effects applied to saw waves (and others), along with the audio. Headphone warning: it sounds pretty gnarly.

https://youtu.be/Tv5c8gPYwFs

Waves has a plugin, MaxxBass which is meant for adding/raising harmonics to create the illusion of audible lower bass tones than the system is actually producing. It gets used pretty commonly in electronic music nowadays but was originally made for more mundane applications like audio mixed for television or theme park speakers.

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