Grime is a small number of hard parts built around a voice: sparse, syncopated drums usually around 140 BPM, a hard square-wave bassline, short dark stabs, and a lot of empty space left for the MC. It is cold, minimal and electronic, and it came out of early 2000s London. Here is what each part is and how they fit.
Works in any DAW, with any drum sounds and any synth, hardware or software. Nothing here needs a particular plugin.
Grime is a UK genre that came out of London in the early 2000s, usually around 140 BPM, made as a backing for MCs rather than as a track you only listen to. The sound is dark, sparse and aggressive: sharp electronic drums, a hard synth bassline, short stabs, and a lot of room left empty for the vocal. Its roots are in UK garage, jungle and dancehall, and you can hear all three in the swing of the drums, the weight of the low end and the way the beat is built for someone to rap over.
The early records around Wiley and Dizzee Rascal are usually taken as the touchstone of the sound, though the scene was always much wider than any two names.
The ingredients stay fairly consistent from track to track. Get them locked together first, and the flavour you build on top is mostly a matter of which parts you lean on:
| Part | Typical | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Tempo | Around 140 BPM | The grime range, fast and driving but built for bars |
| Drums | Sparse and syncopated | Sharp kicks, snappy snares and rimshots with plenty of gaps |
| Bassline | Hard square wave | A short, aggressive low figure that drives the track |
| Stabs | Short dark synth hits | Minor, syncopated stabs that answer the bass |
| Mood | Dark and minimal | Cold, electronic and stripped back |
| Space | Left for the MC | Empty room so the vocal leads and the beat supports it |
Grime pulled from a few older UK styles, and it helps to hear what it took from each. A rough map of where the sound comes from:
| Comes from | What grime took | Where you hear it |
|---|---|---|
| UK garage | The swung, syncopated drum feel and the skip | The groove of the beat |
| Jungle | The dark mood, the sub weight and the raw energy | The low end and the aggression |
| Dancehall | A spare beat made for an MC to ride | The space and the vocal focus |
Build the beat sparse and syncopated at around 140 BPM: a sharp kick, a snappy snare or rimshot on the backbeat, tight hats, and a pattern that leaves clear gaps rather than filling every step. The drums are meant to be hard and dry, not big and washed out, and the spaces you leave are as important as the hits you place.
Use a short, punchy kick and a sharp snare or a rimshot that cuts through, and keep both fairly dry. The kick does not sit on every beat the way a house kick does; it lands on chosen accents, and a rimshot or a clap answers it off the beat. Snappy transients matter more than weight up here, so a tight, clicky snare usually reads better than a long, boomy one.
The groove is inherited from UK garage, so the hats and the kick sit off the main beats and skip rather than march. Place notes on the offbeats and the sixteenths between them, and let a little swing pull them off the straight grid. The point is a beat that lurches and pushes, which is what gives an MC something to ride against.
Grime beats tend to be minimal, with a lot of empty space and only a few elements running at once. The cold, icy end of that is often called eski, after Wiley's early productions, and a lot of early grime was written and traded in eight-bar sections, so an eight-bar loop is a natural length to work in. Whichever way you go, resist filling the gaps: the sparseness is the sound, not a stage you are meant to build past.
The bass and the stabs are usually a hard synth playing a square or saw wave, written as short, syncopated, aggressive figures rather than long held notes. The bassline drives the track from the low end, and the stabs are brief dark hits that answer it in the gaps. Both are minor and cold sounding, and both leave space rather than running continuously.
The classic grime bass is a hard synth on a square wave, a hollow, buzzy tone that sounds aggressive without much processing; the guide to waveforms covers why a square sounds the way it does. Write it as a short, repeating, syncopated figure locked to the kick and kept in one register, which is the same job as any bassline; the bassline guide covers that part in full. Keep it low and simple so it drives the track without turning the bottom to mud.
Over or around the bass sit short stabs: brief, punchy synth chords or single notes, usually in a minor key, placed off the beat so they add tension and movement. A stab is closer to a hit than a held chord, so keep it clipped, and let it trade places with the bass rather than sound at the same time. A simple two or three note riff, dark and repeated, is often all a grime track needs on top of the beat.
Leave space by keeping the beat sparse and by not filling the middle of the mix, because in grime the beat is a bed for the bars, not the whole song. The vocal is the lead, so the track has to leave room for it, in the arrangement and in the frequencies the voice sits in.
That means a few things in practice. Keep the number of parts low, so there is air around each one. Leave rests in the drums and the bass rather than running everything all the time. And avoid crowding the range the voice lives in, so a busy synth line in the same register as the vocal is usually the first thing to thin out or move. When in doubt, take a part away rather than add one.
Loop the drums and the bassline on their own and imagine someone rapping over them. If there is obvious room to breathe and the beat still drives without the vocal, it is working, and the stabs are what you add on top. If it already feels crowded before a voice is anywhere near it, the fix is to take parts out, not to turn the vocal up later.
Everything above is a set of decisions you can make by hand, and it is worth learning to make them. The slow part is the writing itself: finding a hard, syncopated low figure that locks to your kick and grooves, then getting it into the track as notes you can still edit.
REHEAT is a writing tool that generates the part for you. It writes the hard, syncopated square-wave basslines and the short riffs a grime track is built on. Find a pattern you like and you have two ways to use it: drag the MIDI straight onto a track in your DAW, or play it live through your own synth with the REHEAT MIDI DRIVER, locked to your kick. Either way the notes are yours to keep, to change the key, the sound or the timing later.
That is the point of writing the part rather than printing the audio. A bassline is worth more as notes than as a recording, because the notes survive every later decision about the sound and the arrangement.
Free to hear in the browser, no signup. It runs as an Audio Unit, a VST3 and an AAX. Everything above still works by hand in any DAW too, which is rather the point of writing it down.
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