REVscene Automotive Forum - Anyone here listen to Dub-step?

Came across this post on Reddit, thought some people here might find it interesting to learn about dubstep's roots (if the name didn't already give it away)

Electronic music as a general rule is often not designed for home listening; it's designed for dancing in a club or party. This is why the beats are so regular and repetitive, and the songs so long and repetitive; in a club context you would not hear all of the song. They would be mixed into each other to create a continuous flow of music, overlapping. This is why the beats have to be so regular and the tempos so similiar; if they were substantially different it would cause a clashing and phasing effect when played together.
Within electronic music designed primarily for dancing (disregarding the music designed more for home listening) there are two main categories of beat of which a given genre will have one. These are "regular", and "syncopated". Regular beats (such as in house, trance, hardcore - you don't need to know what these are but if you do it can't hurt) are characterised by the presence of the bass drum on each beat. Often there is a snare on the second and fourth beat. So if you use BOOM for the bass drum, and BAP for the snare, and count 1-2-3-4, you'll get BOOM-BAP-BOOM-BAP in most songs.
Syncopated beats on the other hand move off this strict structure, into the notes between the beats. So using the BOOM BAP example as before, if you count 1-and-2-and-3-and-4-and, you might get BOOM-and-2-BAP-BOOM-and-BAP-and.
So the first characteristic of dubstep we can state with confidence is that it comes into the latter category. The percussion, ranging beyond kicks and snares to hihats, tom-toms, bongos, congas, processed electronic noises, shopping trollies and whatever other percussion might exist, is generally off-beat.
Second up, dubstep is an extremely slow music for dance music - averaging 70 beats a minute. Most dance music hovers around the 110-140 beats per minute, with a little extra asteroid belt of about 165-175 bpm for some of the more frenetic syncopated music. (Drum and bass 4lyf.) This odd circumstance came about from its ancestry of another type of syncopated dance music, called UK garage, which normally ran at about 140bpm. Some people started making UK garage tracks with half-time percussion and lots of empty space back in 2002, as they thought it sounded good, and dubstep spun off from there. It's also where the "step" part of the name comes from, as UK Garage was also called 2-step after a characteristic drum pattern found in the music.
The dub part of it, on the other hand, comes from dub reggae; a very important influence. Reggae you probably know; if not, go look it up. Dub reggae is an offshoot of reggae that would happen in Jamaica with the engineers who produced the songs. They would make their own special mixes on their four-tracks and EQs; mixes that cut out the vocals, and focused on the drums and bass, making it a rhythmic piece rather than a particularly melodic one. Crazy effects were put on the mix too; this was in the 1970s before the advent of mainstream electronica so it was quite innovative.
Importantly, in centering the bass and drums, the bass could be made really loud without getting in the way, as it was now the focus. In Jamaica, "soundsystems" were the place to play reggae; massive homebuilt speakers. When you have massive speakers they can handle a lot of bass; so a bass-centered music such as dub reggae was going to come about to take full advantage of this capability, putting out massive walls of low frequencies that you could feel.
Dubstep takes this characteristic from dub reggae; as there are often less elements in a given song, the bass can be more prominent, and make a massive bassy wall just like dub reggae did, exciting clubgoers. This is why if you listen to it on Youtube it may seem strange; it doesn't make sense on small speakers if you cannot hear the volume of the bass. I recommend you actually buy a song from somewhere or download a high quality one (flac or 320mp3), and play it on proper speakers or listen on good headphones.
So to summarise, dubstep is a form of dance music characterised by these two elements; very slow percussion and extremely prominent bass.
Finally, WUBWUBWUB is an onomatopoeia of a sound commonly used within dubstep tracks; a synthesized sound with an low-pass filter applied to it, with the cutoff point off the filter governed by a low-frequency oscillator . This means (if you don't know these terms) the highest frequency of the sound you can hear is repeatedly decreased and increased in volume rhythmically and at high speeds, producing the effect. You can hear this effect in most of the links put here.