There are thousand reason people these days are giving for loving dubstep. I’ve heard everything from the most intelligent comments like, “it gives you a chance to appreciate a part of the sonic spectrum that had previously been all but neglected,” to more questionable reasons like, “you can trick people into thinking its rap,” but after stumbling across a pair of particularly potent Bassnectar tunes, I realized that my own love for dubstep comes from a completely different direction. I love dubstep because it is hard to produce.
One of the biggest advantages of having most of modern music production being software based is that almost anybody with a computer and the mind to crack a program can make music. Unfortunately, this is simultaneously one of it’s biggest disadvantages. With nu-disco at the forefront of electronic music, over-enthusiasm allowed the genre to be stripped down to bones, at which point far too many of our young producers succumbed to the idea that all a track needed to be called a hit single was a 4/4 kick snare pattern with a hat on top. Naturally, buckets of same-sounding music began to pour out of bedroom factories around the world, and without the distribution barriers of the previous decade, they flooded the market. Sure, they all sounded fine, but they weren’t good, and they certainly weren’t anything special. So what did we do? We compensated, by coming to terms with the fact that we’re going to have to sift through endless mediocrity just to find a few decent tracks, and in the disco world, it seems it’s going to stay this way for quite some time.
Dubstep, on the other hand, is a different story. Like I said, dubstep is hard to produce, and that being the case, it naturally deters amateur producers. If you run into a new dubstep tune, chances are it’s going to be good. Anyone can play a synth lick over a 4/4 drum pattern, but melding a grip of sounds into one thick, wonky, atmospheric, rolling bass–that takes talent. Talent that most aspiring producers don’t have.
Long story short, those guys out there with the skills to produce real, quality dubstep deserve our respect.
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Bassnectar – Bass Head (Original Mix) (Removed by request)
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