Tight timing and breathing dynamics: the shaping of sound in EDM

Several of the EDM producers noted that a good groove, groove here understood as a rhythmic pattern including its microrhythmic qualities, affords particular ways of moving, so they often mix while in a standing or dancing-ready position. This emphasis on being able to move reflects the fact that their music often is produced, mixed and mastered to function in a club setting as a means of encouraging people to move and dance and experience embodied pleasure. Accordingly, Charlotte Bendiks called her music ‘body music’. Similarly, Espen Berg (from Seeb) argued: ‘Electronic dance music is all about creating energy in the body’.

Several informants mentioned that they exploit the combination of tight and off-the-grid sounds to achieve this embodied quality of EDM grooves, grid here referring to the grid that marks beat and subdivision positions in a sequencer. Sometimes they shuffle sounds by milliseconds either behind or ahead of the reference grid (Bendiks), or they move a whole section of a track in this way. Knut Sævik (from Mungolian Jet Set) and the members of Seeb use track delay in tandem with the positioning of several sounds specifically to accentuate the grid. Berg from Seeb stated: ‘If all the sounds are staggered at the same time, it wouldn't work’. Likewise, if the music consisted solely of straight sixteenth notes, it would have sounded lifeless and boring and even ceased to function, according to Berg.

Not surprisingly, the producers also employ quantisation to their tracks in different ways. Seeb often use the quantisation swing-percentage tool in Ableton Live to experiment with polyrhythmic patterns in which some of the subdivisions are swing-quantised within a certain ‘pocket’ of roughly 22–40 per cent swing (zero representing a straight sixteenth-note pattern and 100 per cent representing a sixteenth-note triplet shuffle beat). Sævik and Per Martinsen (Mental Overdrive) use quantisation when they want a strict grid-based aesthetic involving sixteenth-note subdivisions typical of techno.

However, this cultivation of ‘super quantised’ music with ‘an immensely quantised clock running’, as Martinsen puts it, also demands an interest in manipulating perceived timing at the microlevel. Rather than the sounds’ physical placements (thinking in terms of waveforms), Martinsen reported that he concentrates on shaping their sonic features to impact microtiming. For example, he often works with the sounds’ envelope, adjusting attack and release times: ‘the extension of [the rise time of the attack by] slowly opening a hi-hat, for example, changes the whole groove’. Seeb also works with timing by manipulating the sonic features of rhythmic events. For example, they often add transients in order to add rhythmic impact or punch to a sound, and they use sidechain compression abundantly.Footnote ⁶ If, for example, a hi-hat stroke is momentarily compressed (or attenuated) whenever the bass drum is present (meaning that the bass drum serves as the compressor's trigger signal), it will acquire a completely different shape than it had originally, and the swing and energy will change accordingly thanks to the corresponding increase and decrease in its volume. Also Sævik finds that changing the envelope of the sound can have a big impact. He is also concerned with shaping timbral details in the sound of different instruments and says that this can impact the groove significantly: ‘Is the hi-hat a “t-t-t” or is it a “tch”? [This] has a huge effect.’

The balance between the different sounds’ levels, that is, relative intensity, also has a significant impact on how we experience the groove according to our informants. Increasing the loudness of sounds will automatically make them become more dominant in the overall sound and have more impact on the microrhythmic feel. Just two decibels in the wrong direction can, according to Martinsen, impoverish the whole groove, in the sense of staggering its flow. Like Martinsen, Sævik also finds that balancing the relative sound levels affects the experience of the timing aspects of the groove – loud sounds seem slow, he suggests, while soft sounds seem fast.

Because they all produce music for club speakers and settings, the EDM producers often foregrounded sounds in a low, even sub-bass, frequency area. In order to keep these dominating low-frequency sounds from masking one another and otherwise becoming muddy, all of the producers reported applying sidechain compression simply to ‘tidy up’ the sound. Martinsen described sidechaining as a means of making the groove breathe: ‘One of the most important things about groove is the gaps … If it [the track] is too busy, then the groove disappears, and you are left with a wall’. Martinsen, Bendiks and Berg (from Seeb) all advocate for a ‘less-is-more’ ideal, because it is so important to provide enough space for all of the sounds (although, as Berg emphasises, the soundscape is often much more complex than it actually sounds, with a single sound in fact comprising several layers of sound, for example).

In all, our examination of what EDM producers associate with a good groove demonstrates the vast impact of the manipulation of microlevel sonic features, which encompasses tweaking sounds and balancing the tracks’ sound levels. Sound, in the sense of individual sounds’ features, is thus a microrhythmic parameter that is actively shaped in EDM production. Active manipulation of microtiming at the millisecond level was also important to some of the producers, although the scale of their adjustments was often too fine-grained to be perceivable as adjustments in timing per se. Most of the producers were aware of the ways in which the choice of sounds as well as the various techniques for manipulating sound, such as sidechaining and dynamics, might affect the sound's perceived timing. They all find sonic features extremely significant for groove, and Bendiks simply stated that, in the music she produces, her sound is her groove.Footnote ⁷

The elastic feel of hip-hop: choosing, combining, manipulating and moving sounds

According to Tommy Tee, virtually anything – down to the tiniest of details – could potentially ‘spark’ the right feeling in a hip-hop groove (in the sense of a genre-typical beat or pattern), but ‘[t]he choice of sounds is super, super, super, super important’. An effective composite kick drum is often produced by layering separate sounds with different sonic characteristics, for example. The typical kick drum in 2018 was, according to Tommy Tee, based on a low-tuned 808 kickFootnote ⁸ that is almost completely deprived of any attack (to represent the sub-range bass frequencies), combined with a dry and more processed kick layered on top of it. Lastly, a more resonant ‘live-sounding kick’ is stuck between these two layers, to fill in the mid-range frequencies and make the kick drum stick out more through smaller speakers, as well as provide more attack and better definition overall. When and how fast the bass drum sound fades away also makes a difference – whether the bass drum goes ‘whmm’ or ‘wooohm’, that is, influences the ‘mood’ of a track. The latter is more ‘laid back’, whereas the former is more ‘on’, Tee emphasises. He also sometimes lowers the kick drum pitch to achieve a heavier, more laid-back feel: ‘If you move a kick drum up or down a few semitones, you will hear a big difference’.

The attack portion of a sound receives close attention from several other producers as well. According to Amund in Basmo Fam, ‘slow’ synth sounds have a long attack time and ‘fast’ ones have a short attack time. For snare drums, then, Amund prefers ‘short and straight on’. Øyvind (also of Basmo Fam) says that whereas the timing of a fast attack sound feels very close to where one places the onset, brass sounds on a synth, where the sound ‘swells’ after the onset, are generally late or slow. Attacks are also controlled through sound processing. To make the snap of a kick-drum attack more evident, for example, Tommy Tee increases ‘some frequencies in the upper register of the sound’ using compression or EQ.

Erlend in the Kvam collective also associates slow beats with ‘long pads, long slow sounds’, and short sounds with a ‘staccato vibe’. His main approach is to choose his sounds very deliberately and then manipulate them within the synth software. In the trap genre, the ideal is to align everything on the beat, but he thinks that if he limits himself to the grid-based sequencer in his preferred FL Studio software, the groove becomes a little too monotonous and rigid: ‘Then you … have to go deeper, change a few things’. He then manipulates timing directly, moving hi-hats and melodic events later in time: ‘If you can hear that a melody on a piano is produced by a computer, if every note hits perfectly on the beats, I change the notes so that everything is a little late’. He also uses plug-ins to chop up single tracks and twist the positioning of the fragments so that the whole rhythm changes.

Relatedly, several of the hip-hop producers reported a strong propensity towards unquantised recording and sequencing, or intuitively working ‘off-the-grid’ in digital sequencers. Knut Petter Sævik stressed how his approach to hip-hop is different from his approach to EDM, where everything comes down to ‘inserting … removing … and moving things until it becomes just right’. For hip-hop grooves, he instead records himself over and over again playing various instruments with his own ‘flawed’ (off-the-grid) timing until ‘it swings in the right way’. Similarly, Tommy Tee described how he once lost the ability to achieve the swing he desired, so he decided to stop quantising and instead practice playing and triggering his own drums and samples until he felt like he had established and naturalised ‘his own swing’. Both Sævik and Tommy Tee reported that, although they might occasionally move a note that does not sit quite right in the groove, they would rather start over again from scratch than move too many notes, because, as Tommy Tee put it, ‘then the whole point is gone. You just sit there and nerd yourself away’.

The members of Basmo Fam, on the other hand, almost always end up quantising a track, though they sometimes preserve synth-plucks and similar sounds just as they were recorded, in order to introduce some variation to the track's timing. Most of all, they seek a stable sonic basis. As Eirik from Basmo Fam explained: ‘It seems as though it is easier for many rappers to start on top of … a simple loop, which we think is unfinished but still functions to keep the tempo. Then we can finish it [manipulate the timing] afterwards’. Kristian in Kholebeatz related the binary choice of quantisation vs. non-quantisation directly to the musical style in question. If he is producing East or West Coast hip-hop, he consciously moves events off the grid. If he is producing southern trap, the ideal is very different: ‘May I call it robotic?’ he asked rhetorically.

The hip-hop producers had different ideals and approaches in terms of the use of sampling. Kristian from Kholebeatz liked the fact that one has to take the sample's own rhythm into consideration. The members of Basmo Fam also noted that samples introduce variation to the timing. Both Tommy Tee and Sævik were very clear about the importance of the meticulous editing of a sample's start and end points in the interests of achieving the ‘right’ timing and avoiding lopsidedness when looping the sample. Conversely, Kholebeatz, uses deliberately inaccurate chopping of samples: ‘Often I chop the sample slightly before the sample begins. … I chop it … perhaps half a second before. To get that laid-back West coast vibe’. Generally, he thinks that sampling leads to more playfulness: ‘When you sample, you can … find rhythms in that sample … it can be anything from a built-in drum roll that is a bit offbeat to a trumpet that you never would have thought of yourself, if you were to program it yourself’. That's what he likes with samples: ‘You have to adjust to it [the sample], adjust to its “takt” [tactus], and then it might happen that you need to be 100% quantised, or that you have to lay back again’.

In sum, the hip-hop producers were very conscious of the ways in which the choice and combination of sounds, as well as the manipulation of the sounds’ shape and sonic features impact the timing and feel of a groove. Some producers preferred what they referred to as flawed timing, whereas others mostly used quantised tracks, depending on the given style and subgenre. The quantised approach to hip-hop beats reportedly leaves room for the elaboration of rhythm and timing in the rapped parts, but often some layers are quantised and others manipulated to be off the grid through manual or computational procedures. Generally, the producers paid ample attention to the effects of sound, timing, as well as their interaction.

The perfection of collective ‘time’ in jazz

Several of our jazz informants talked about perfecting the groove, in the sense of playing the chosen rhythmic pattern in the most aesthetically satisfactory way, as a process of optimising a shared sense of ‘time’ through collective interaction. According to trumpet player Eckhard Baur, when people practice together, they come to feel the given rhythm in the same way. Guitarist Knut Værnes thinks that optimal interaction in a band ‘is about listening’. Drummer Ola Øverby agrees: ‘The coolest musicians keep a lot of air in the groove while at the same time being so insanely tuned into each other's time. I mean, how can you achieve that if nobody keeps the pace? [It is] as if they have a shared inner time which they connect to’. His bandmate vocalist Sofie Tollefsbøl says that groove is the starting point for everything she does as a singer and that she plays a part in creating that groove through the considerable freedom she has in terms of timing in the genre. Saxophone player Morten Halle, who has extensive experience with smaller ‘chamber’ jazz ensembles, also thinks that the timekeeping function is shared among all of the musicians:

This varies from style to style, though. For Baur, whose experience is mostly in the big band tradition, the drummer is the ultimate timing reference and has to negotiate among the different sections: ‘If the horn section is expected to play laid back, the drummer has to divide himself in two. Everything that's related to the constant, steady rhythm is “in time”, whereas every hit is timed together with us [the horn section]’. Generally, tiny adjustments in timing can change the whole feel and stylistic reference of a groove: ‘A bit more shuffled is like going ten years back in time. A bit less shuffled, then we're suddenly in the fifties’, drummer Øverby says.

In terms of the importance of sonic features, shaping the attack is mentioned by several of our interviewees. When bassist Ellen Andrea Wang wants to play in a pushed manner, she ‘wants it to “pop” a little more, the attack [on the string] is harder’. According to Wang, such ‘popped’ sounds always anticipate the beat. When playing behind, the attack is softer. Softer sounds are also more flexible: ‘If the groove is going, soft sounds may “live” a little more timing-wise’. Similarly, guitarist Knut Værnes points out that when he wants to play in a laid-back manner, he often switches from a pick to his fingers to produce a softer sound. For vocalist Sofie Tollefsbøl, the sound of the words is important: ‘That the word has a sound or a consonant … creates a rhythmic effect in a way’. Drummer Ola Øverby stresses the importance of dynamics when it comes to achieving a good groove: ‘[Dynamics] has an insane amount to say … It is in a way the second most important … after the actual timing’. He uses the snare drum as an example: ‘If [the snare drum] is high dynamically, it has a completely different function in the beat than when it is low’.

Several informants also thought about how sonic and temporal features interact. Halle says, ‘A sharp sound acts differently than a muffled sound, and therefore it has to be placed differently [in time] as well’. He thinks that rhythmically precise soundscapes call for sharp sounds. Tollefsbøl observes that a heavier sound can influence the timing of the whole band: ‘The band starts playing behind the beat when the bass drum gets heavier. Hmm. Or it sounds thicker, kind of’. Øverby puts it this way: ‘Quick and sharp, and soft and slow … There is something with the soft and slow that is kind of – that is more behind the beat in itself. While the bright or sharp and quick one is kind of earlier’. Guitarist Værnes talked about what to do timing-wise when one switches from plectrum to finger-playing – since the latter produces a softer sound, one must play the string earlier in order to remain on the beat.

Overall, the jazz musicians’ primary focus was timing, but they also reflect on sonic qualities related to different playing techniques and how these enable them to articulate a note as sharp (early) or soft (late) and thus influence the timing feel. However, several of them tended to frame sonic features as something to adjust to in order to maintain the desired timing. All of our informants stressed that sharing an inner sense of pulse is crucial to making a jazz groove work and that the perfection of a collective, dialogical sense of timing is key to the process of musical interaction.

Samba: playing with timing, ghost notes and accentuation

In terms of what constitutes a good samba groove, many of our samba informants talked about the importance of specific patterns (levadas), and even used music transcriptions to visualise and specify those patterns and their internal syncopated structures during the interviews. At the same time, everyone pointed first and foremost to a musician's ability to interpret the music, microrhythmically moving beyond the prescribed patterns. According to pandeiro player Marcio Caparroz, the pandeiro pattern, for example, is characterised by a particular accentuation and microtiming of the sixteenth notes: ‘One idiomatic thing about samba is the accentuation of the last note of the beat, and the first. The fourth and the first … I try to do this on the tambourine. The two other notes, then, are the opposite, that you don't accentuate. Try to make it sound lower. Give more value to the well-accented notes’. The surdo (bass drum), on the other hand, is experienced as lagging behind within the pandeiro rhythm because of the open sound that is allowed to resonate almost beyond the next beat: ‘It's as if you're late … Leaving the sound open makes the note last longer … the first semi-quaver note of the second period. It's almost late’.

Along these lines, many percussionists and guitarists argued for the importance of ‘ghost notes’. Guimarães said, ‘After playing samba for a while, I always found that specific combinations of ghost notes were crucial for the suingue. When I listened to João Bosco, Baden Powell, Rafael Rabelo [legendary samba guitarists], I realised that they fill in with these ghosted sixteenths notes’. Guimarães demonstrates the way in which these ghost notes act as a sort of complementary rhythm to a given pattern, ‘filling in’ most of the sixteenth notes that were not articulated by the pattern. The temporal structure and sonic shape of these ghost notes, as well as their interaction with the main pattern, constituted crucial tacit knowledge that was required to make the samba groove.Footnote ⁹

Guimarães also argued that guitar phrasings are greatly influenced by rhythmic ideals originating with the singers and their tendency to phrase behind to cool down the other pulsating rhythms. More generally, patterns should be stretched temporally in the right direction and articulated with specific accents. According to guitarist, singer and percussionist Matheus Crippa, a samba groove that lacks such qualities would sound ‘square and boring’ (quadrado). Instead, the music should ‘breathe’ in its own way and express a human sense of playfulness and fun (brincadeira). The quality of playfulness resides in things like the musician's ability to suddenly displace the sounds a bit early or late, to change and alter the pattern, or to introduce a break that disrupts the whole flow of the groove for a moment before restoring its balance again. These microrhythmic variations are pleasurable surprises that make people smile, dance, and interact, Crippa argued, hence contributing to the ‘joyful party’ and social space that samba aimed to create.

Importantly, the different instruments (including their associated registers) that make up the samba groove have different roles with regard to phrasing, sonic shape and accentuation. Legendary samba drummer Oscar Bolão argued that some of the greatest surdo musicians always played a little bit behind, contributing the right feeling of balance in the lower register, one that was not stressed but rather calm and joyful, whereas the pandeiro pattern and the percussion instruments in the middle and upper registers typically pushed the samba groove forward a bit. He also tried to bring this pleasurable tension to the drum set, which meant both playing ahead of the beat (in the middle and upper registers) and behind the beat (in the lower register) at the same time. Musicians often referred to this aesthetic ideal as balanço (‘balanced’) and believed that too many simultaneous improvisations would undermine it. Samba singer and percussionist Toinho Melodia described balanço through the metaphor of musical waves:

Other informants pointed to the balancing function of the syncopated and more energetic patterns played in the middle and upper registers by the other percussion instruments. As Bolão underscored, these sounds pushed the participating listener deeper into euphoria, and for him it was this particular combination of calmness and euphoria that characterised a good samba groove.

These comments on the instruments’ different roles also relate to the more general idea of playing samba as a dialogic and interactive process. As Guimarães put it: ‘The main thing is the ability to dialogue between the musicians, because the beat will be good because the dialogue between the people who play it is clear. The suingue does not exist in one instrument … but in how one is, for example, playing this thing [refers to a recorded example] and another does something else. Each fills the spaces, without anyone occupying the space of the other, and it is this combination that will be what generates the groove, the swing (suingue)’.

In sum, our informants stressed the importance of complementarity between the played rhythms, and of microrhythmically delaying and pushing rhythmic events to achieve the right overall feel. The sound and flavour of the instruments were also important, although the former, in particular, was considered to be inherent to the instrument itself. Playful timing, or the right combination of early and late timings in the dialogue between the different instruments – what was earlier described as ‘waves in the sea’ – was an ideal here. The right suingue also depended heavily on the performer's articulation of expression, including accentuating the right beats and adding the appropriate ghost notes.

Fiddle: melodic–rhythmic variation as groove-forming element

Within the Scandinavian fiddle traditions, the style-specific concept of groove [‘takt’] is wedded to the fact that the music is meant for dancing. It is indeed striking that dance remains such an important reference point here, even as few of our informants regularly played for dancers. Correspondingly, the musicians’ discourse about groove involved various metaphors of movement, such as lift, drive, flow and forward thrust. Movement also appeared more literally, in references to dancers’ movements, and to the physical movements of the musician, including bowing patterns, foot stomping and ornamental fingerings. In what follows, more specific observations will focus on timing, sound and timing–sound interactions, respectively.

Among the fiddlers we interviewed, groove was not primarily associated with the temporal placement of sounds, although some did point to variation in their ‘timing’. Anne Hytta and Anders Røine emphasised the importance of avoiding monotony by means of microrhythmic displacements of the regular distribution of beat durations.Footnote ¹⁰ In a similar vein, Herbjørn Liahagen and Ottar Kaasa described a tension-and-release strategy in which there is an alternation between ‘holding back’ and ‘letting go’ within the phrases, which produces not only beats of varying lengths but also significant fluctuations in the overall measure duration (cf. Johansson Reference Johansson2017). These strategies allude to the music being structured in long phrases or sentences of varying length, rather than short repetitive chunks (1–2–3, 1–2–3, etc.). Alongside these limited interests in timing, there was a strong urge to make tunes come alive rhythmically by considering every musical gesture to be open to microrhythmic alteration. Variation and deviation are recurring aspects of this effort, but in relation to preceding or alternative interpretations of musical gestures, not to some objective reference for the temporal placement of sounds. Liahagen cautioned, ‘When I speak of deviations, I'm simply referring to deviations from the last time I played the same motif’.

Within the fiddle tradition, as in the jazz and samba tradition, the concept of sound is closely tied to the qualities of the instrument and the fine-tuned interaction between instrument and performer. Kaasa and Hytta repeatedly characterised an ideal sound as a successful compromise between softness (and richness) and sharpness – ‘a rounded timbral space’ that also affords clarity and transparency in rhythmic and ornamental articulation, onset quality, and timbral variation. On that note, all of the fiddlers talked about and played for us the alternation of softer and sharper sounds as a key feature of a groovy rhythmic performance. In addition, Røine emphasised dynamic range and the importance of finding ‘the point of balance at which the string sound and the resonance from the instrument meet’. At that sweet spot, the volume is not maxed out, which allows for dynamic variations in both directions.

When the relationships among sonic features, timing and groove were brought into the discussion, fiddlers pointed to the ways in which the fiddle sounds and responds, and the impact of these qualities on the temporal domain of performance and experience. On a more detailed level, Hytta, Liahagen and Kaasa talked about ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ fiddles in terms of different rhythmic styles of playing, which in turn demand various forms and degrees of responsiveness, precision and clarity. As an example of how such musical features interact, Liahagen noted that some fiddlers are particularly good at creating and maintaining a continuous ringing sound in the instrument, partly through certain patterns of intonation (that is, finger placement and the corresponding pitching of notes). He also claimed that sound such as this ‘affects the experience of rhythm and flow in a temporal sense as well … to achieve a good groove … there can't be any empty spaces within the fiddle, in a way … So, one sort of has to develop a good sound in the fiddle as well, to get the proper forward thrust’. Both Hytta and Liahagen associated a bad sound with a bad (or undanceable) groove. In terms of explicit timing/sound interactions, our informants showed some inclination to associate sharp sounds with early attacks, and softer sounds and slow onsets with a more ambiguous temporal positioning. Interestingly, the ambiguity of these vague or ‘secret’ (Hytta) attacks was in itself seen as an important rhythmic quality.

In synthesising these observations, we found that a unifying thread among the fiddlers was that groove is conceptualised as a multiparameter and dynamic phenomenon. It is multiparameter in the sense that timing and duration, the dynamics of tone production, the way in which the melody is articulated, and the way in which the sound of the instrument is utilised to propel the music forward are equally important aspects of what is associated with a good groove. It is dynamic in the sense that a proper balance of weight, flow and drive arises via the interactions among all aspects of the music, which mutually influence one another during the course of performance. One implication of this character is that there is no particular timing and/or accentuation pattern (that is, there is no generalised groove template) that exists independent of the particularities of the individual performance, or that can be translated between different tunes. It is instead a performance's unique combination of musical features that determines its musically viable timings and accentuations. In this genre, then, variation is seen as an important contributor to groove across several aspects of rhythmic performance: the choice of accented notes; the phrasing of the music via bowing patterns, rhythmic subdivisions and ornamentations; the alternation between sharper and softer onsets, and the different sound colours of the instrument; and melodic and intonational variation.