Every hardcore track starts from the same place: the kick. In the early 90s producers took the bass drum of the Roland TR-909, a drum machine house music already loved, and drove it into distortion until it stopped sounding like a drum and started sounding like a hammer.
That one decision changed everything. A distorted kick fills the whole low end, so there is no room for a bassline: the kick IS the bassline. Tracks became simple and brutal, a kick on every beat and samples on top, and dancers stopped moving their hips and started moving their feet.
Thirty years of the same idea
Every genre since has been a new answer to the same question: how should the kick sound now? Deeper and longer in nu style, tuned and melodic on the main stage, rolling in frenchcore, raw and short in uptempo. Learn to hear the kick and you can tell the decade of a track in two seconds.
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Nr. 01
