Difference between Techno music "styles"...

I love techno… but I have always danced at parties more than listened to it… so exact differences between “house”, “trance”, “Drum n’Bass” and the last one I forgot arent very clear to me. What is the difference ? Which is which ?

The Electronica Primer is an excellent website that explains everything you’re looking for, complete with sound samples.

House and trance are often pretty similar…

once you hear drum n bass you wont mistake anything else for it.
Breakbeat is pretty easy to spot as well.

After sorting through the link above, the best sample for drum n bass is the one listed for “two step”…that is closest to what you generally hear called drum n bass these days.

If I had to guess, unless your party host was a serious electronic dance music freak, that you were listening to trance…it’s probably the genre most casual listeners are into.

There is a subgenre down here (usually called Florida breaks) that fuses a broken beat with trance type vocals and melodies…it’s become hugely popular, but you don’t hear it in clubs or parties much unless you are in FL

If you want to check out breaks and drum n bass, go get DJ Rap’s new double CD…one disc is all drum n bass, and the second disc is all FL breaks.

I’ve been to a few clubs myself… and near as I can describe the difference between drum and bass and trance is that trance ‘flows’ a bit better than drum and bass. Drum and bass also sounds a bit harsher (at least to my ear) with the beats being sharper and more pounding while trance you almost… feel I’d say.

It’s kinda hard for me to describe.

Um, drum n bass is radically different from trance.

Drum and bass generally has what you would consider a “classic” sounding drumbeat (like a drummer is sitting and playing on the drums), and it generally is a broken beat as well.

The bass is a wailing, grinding type bass laid over the drum track. It CAN be, but generally isn’t, a “boomy” type bass.

Go to the above site, click on DnB, then click on the sample for two step.

Trance and house are easily confused…but once you hear real DnB, you will never confuse it with the clubbier trance sound

There are hundreds of different subgenres of electronic music. Many of them are essentially produced only by one or a very few artists; some of them are equivalent to other terms.

Basically, all electronic music can be categorized as one of six types: house, trance, techno, drum and bass, breaks and hardcore.

House, trance and (sometimes) hardcore generally have 4/4 drums; they go thump thump thump thump. Techno (sometimes), drum and bass, breaks and (sometimes) have ‘breakbeats’, which are probably best described as not 4/4. They go boom-ch boom-ch-boom, or something like that. =)

The Electronica Primer is probably the best introduction to the different genres, though it’s somewhat out of date. There used to be a slightly more thorough introduction called “Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music”, but it was extremely sarcastic in a way that can only be understood by people who listen to electronic music. It’s gone now, though apparently an updated version is ‘coming soon’.

In my experience, most people who listen to electronic music can’t really tell the difference between more than a few sub-genres of the major genres. Some of the names, like I said before, are equivalent. Very few people can differentiate between, say, jump-up, techstep and hardstep, which are some of the types of two-step drum and bass.

You probably already know that there are extensive and bitter rivalries between people who like certain kinds of music and those who like others. (Drum and bass is probably the worst for this, because it is vastly superior to all other music. =)) There’s also the problem of what you call the music as a whole. “Electronic music” seems to be acceptable, if barely. “Electronica” is not, except in record stores. “Techno” is entirely unacceptable, because it is a specific kind of music generally listened to by people who are very defensive of their tastes. It’s always a problem if someone says they like “techno”, because it means one of two things: either they don’t know what to call electronic music as a whole, or they really do like techno, and will be extremely insulted by my thinking they didn’t know what they were talking about.

Oh… there are some errors on the Electronica Primer, at least in the jungle page. I think there are probably about six people remaining in the world who care, so I don’t think I’ll bother to point them out. But some of the years are wrong…

The jump-up sample isn’t exactly what I’d think of as being jump-up, though Aphrodite is most certainly jump-up. Ishkur’s sample track was Aphrodite - The Bomber Style, which is a perfect example of the bass in drum and bass. The two-step track doesn’t work on my computer. Try looking for Q Project - Champion Sound, which is a good example of two-step drums; I’m not going to get into discussing what genre it belongs in either historically or musically.

Ragga jungle probably deserves more mention than it’s given on that page. An example is Rude and Deadly - Mash dem down, which is without any doubt whatsoever the greatest musical composition in human history. It may now be impossible to find…

Off to Cafe Society.

DrMatrix - GQ Moderator

Well, over here in Europe, the term electronica is used to describe electronic music that is more suited to listening than dancing. That term would cover stuff like Schneider TM, some Autechre, Boards of Canada, some of Björk’s mellow stuff, Massive Attack etc. Electronica often contains the same elements as the dance-oriented music but has less strict rules - you don’t have to have the beat there for the whole track, for instance. This allows for greater dynamics and slow songs.

Take Moloko, for instance. A lot of their records actually consists of quite straight pop-type songs and the stuff you hear in clubs are different versions - dance mixes (or whatever they call them) with more emphasis on the beat and the catchy chorus.

Just a slight nitpick. Most breakbeats are actually in the 4/4 meter. It’s true that you don’t hear a bassdrum on each 1-2-3-4 beat like in house and trance, but technically it’s still 4/4. For some different meters, try Lamb, Squarepusher and, of course, Aphex Twin.

I got lots of good info when I asked about electronica many moons ago.

Good stuff in that thread.

I wouldn’t know how to begin to describe the D & B beat.

Try here. Ignore the snarky comments (or enjoy them for what they are) and it’s a pretty good guide.

I usually just call it electronic dance music (EDM).

As has been said, d&b IS usually in 4/4. It’s just that you won’t get the typical “four to the floor” kick drum that stylize more popular forms of electronic music, like house and trance.

Basically, the drum and bass beat sounds like a funk beat sped WAY up. What you get is a lot of off-beats accented by the snare and the drum. So in a 4 beat bar of house, you might get snare or claps on just 2 and 4, and kick on all four. With d&b, you have a more syncopated feel. You might get a kick on the first and second eighth notes and on the second half of beat 3. The snare may be on beats 2 and 4, but also on the last sixteenth of the second beat and the second sixteenth of the third beat. And at a much faster tempo that house/trance.

Basically, this makes the beat feel more broken-up. You have a lot of snare accents that fall in-between eightnotes, rather than on the beat, and a lot of kick drum not on the beat, either.

Ah, screw it, just listen to the samples.

So with all definitions said above how would you classify my favorites:

-Propellerheads
-Prodigy
-Chemical Brothers
-Xpress 2
-Moby
-Fatboy Slim

And one of my least favorites:
-Carl Cox

Hampshire: Propellerheads, Fatboy Slim and Chemical Brothers are Big Beat, which is a form of Breakbeat (Breaks).

Prodigy is Big Beat with a bit of punk thrown in.

Moby was techno in his earlier days, but his last two albums could probably be best described as electronica. While electronica is often used as umbrella term for all this music, it can also refer to this particular style; somewhat ambient, but more active and purposeful, with stronger beats. Made for listening rather than background noise.

Some Moby songs can be classified as other things, though. Bodyrock is pretty much Big Beat, while some of his other songs approach Trip Hop.

Don’t know Xpress 2, or if I do, I can’t remember what they sound like.

Carl Cox is generally known for his hard house sets (and for his residence at Krobar in Chicago).

He is also known because he mixes with 3 turntables.

I’m not aware that he is a very big producer…when you say you dislike Carl Cox, I’m guessing you mean you don’t like the type of music he generally spins, which is usually Hard House.

To follow up on Pulykamel’s post…on some DnB, there is no kick drum at all…in fact most of the DnB I listen to has almost none…all the bass is grinding, winding type bass…
example— Hardstep, by DJRap