Download Club Dance Remix - revision crib sheet

=Causeway Performing Arts=
Club Dance
(Area of Study 3)
Put dub, disco, hip-hop and electronic music together, and you get club dance.
It all started in Chicago
Chicago is one of the music capitals of the world. One of the many music genres the starter there was house
music, one of the earliest forms of club dance music.
In the early 1980s, producers took disco and made the 4 4 beat deeper and stronger. Dub, jazz and synthpop
motifs were layered over the bass using the technologies developed by bands like Kraftwerk.
The basic house sound set the pattern for the later variations of dance music. Around the same time, a
similar music style called techno was developing in Detroit.
Club dance really took off in the 1980s and 90s
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In the 1980s and 1990s club dance music became more and more popular.
All-night raves were organised in big deserted buildings like warehouses (mostly illegally). Dance
music developed its own culture separate from the pop and rock scene.
As recording and mixing technology developed, new styles of dance music appeared. A lot of the new
techniques people came up with are still used today.
In recent years, the technology has become cheaper and more widely available. Just about anyone can
make their own music and distribute it via the Internet. Because there’s so much new music around,
new styles are popping up all the time.
Dancing at raves and clubs is improvised. There are some moves that crop up involving dramatic arm
movements in time to the beat, such as the ever so cool Big fish, Little fish, Cardboard Box. People also
wave glow sticks around and jump in time to the fast beat of the music.
Club dance comes in many styles.
Styles and names in club dance change all the time - they vary so they can be a bit tricky to define. Here are
a few basic definitions to get you started:
House - 4 4 beat (like all club dance). Lots of repetition, especially the bassline and lots of drum machine
sounds.
Techno - fast, hard beat, usually between 130 and 150 beats per minute, though can be much faster in
hardcore techno. Rarely any voices or live sounds. Sounds mechanical and electronic.
Jungle/drum and bass - mega-fast tempo, often reaching 170 bpm. Drum-based with very strong, deep
bassline. There are lots of short, fast notes called ‘Break beats’ played between the main beats, giving it a
disjointed feel.
UK garage - dance music that uses ideas from jungle, drum and bass and modern rhythm and blues. Vocal
sounds are used like percussion.
Trance - very repetitive sound. Uses echoey and electronic sounds and lots of effects. Slow chord changes
over a fast beat are meant to make you feel like you’re in a trance.
Ambient - slow, sometimes jazzy. Usually sounds chilled and out of this world.
Rave - fast, electronic dance music using samples from different songs.
=Causeway Performing Arts=
Takeaway technology and you basically can’t have club dance.
All club dance uses music technology
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Club dance music uses music technology rather than live instruments.
At a live performance in the club, the DJ or MC plays backing tracks and adds in extra sounds with
samples, keyboards or a drum machine to build the piece up. They might do a bit of live rap too.
In the studio a producer basically does the same thing - laying down a backing track and then adding
other sounds over it.
Fatboy Slim and Calvin Harris are famous DJs. Their music isn’t just popular in clubs - it’s made it into
the charts as well. Fatboy Slim’s ‘Praise You’ got to number one in 1999.
DJs use different techniques to make dance tracks
Mixing - DJs work with twin record decks and vinyl records. Records with a similar number of beats per
minute and in the same key are mixed together to create continuous dance music.
Scratching - DJs turn records backwards and forwards by hand. The stylus makes a scratchy noise in the
groove of the vinyl.
Sampling - this is using snippets of other people’s tunes, rhythms or voices in your own music, eg. Audio
Bullys featured a sample of Nancy Sinatra in Shot You Down. Distortion changes the sound of the sample (it
distorts it).
Looping - recordings of short patterns of notes or rhythms, usually four bars long, are constantly repeated
(looped) to make longer patterns.
Digital effects - special effects are used to create interesting sounds like reverb and echo. Another popular
one is a vocoder which makes human voices sound like synthesised sounds. Digital effects can also be used
to change the attack on certain sounds.
Quantising - computers can shift notes backwards and forwards to the nearest semiquaver giving a track
that’s in perfect time. Lots of club dance tracks are quantised to make them sound robotic. Groove
quantising is the opposite - it makes computer - generated tracks sound more human.
Sequencing - this is a way of building up a song by recording lots of tracks one over another. It’s usually
done on a computer. Tracks could be electronic sounds, samples, real instruments and voices, synthesised
instruments, or a mixture of all of these. It is sometimes called multitracking.
Club dance remixes users lots of samples
Lots of record companies release a club dance remix of a pop or rock tune to get it better known on the club
scene. Basically it’ll be faster, snappier and a lot easier to dance to than the original. This is the kind of thing
that DJs and producers do to create a remix:
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They mix in samples from other songs, e.g. a chorus hook line or bass riff, to create a collage of
sound. The collage is often laid over the top of the repeating drum and bass loop.
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They change the texture to keep the music interesting. Texture changes are often created by
stopping the drum and bass for a few beats - when they kick back in, the deep thumping bass
makes a big impression.
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They introduce breaks - sections where there’s just one or more solo instrument. This changes
the texture too.