Dubstep Music - New Dubstep And How To Make It

The year is 1998. The place is London. Some local DJ's are hard at working taking 2-step garage songs and grime songs, turning them into a dub remix, and throwing in elements of breakbeat and drum and bass. The sound is dark. The sound is brooding. The sound is Dubstep.

Dubstep is mostly dark music, written in a minor key and using dissonant harmonies and a sub-bass that blows out your subwoofer. Toss in some samples and maybe some vocals every once in a while and you've got a hit. A lot of times there's the classic WUBWUB wobble bass, or the robotic transformer sound (which many argue is actually called "Brostep".

The best dubstep producers use Ableton Live to make their dubstep. Lets look at how it's made.

Usually ranging between 130 and 150 BPM, the dubstep drums are syncopated, shuffled, and often tuplets. Snare hits are on the third beat in the bar, and heavily influenced by 2-step drum patterns. Now a days there's a lot of half-step drum patterns as well, which flowed into grime and now the influencer has become the influenced. Much of the modern dubstep is starting to use hip hop style beats.

Wobble bass has become a staple of dubstep. The wobble bass is the "WUB WUB WUB" sound the bass makes, usually on top of the sub-bass. To make a wobble bass, all you need is to manipulate your low frequency oscillator's volume, distortion, and cutoff filter.

The standard structure of a dubstep song is the intro, main section, bass drop, midsection, main section, bass drop, outro.

A bass drop, which comes from drum and bass, is when the track gets quieter, often due to drums being cut, and then comes back suddenly with an intense sub bass line and hard hitting drums. Does a dubstep song have to have a bass drop? No, but most of the popular songs do.

• Skrillex
• Skream
• Doctor P
• Flux Pavilion
• Excision
• Nero
• Zed's Dead
• Noisa
• 12th Planet