What is grime?

Music Grime / Bass
1

Hey folks,

im having a hard time defining grime. Like what does a song need to be considered “grime” and what are the key elements of “grime”?

Thanks in advance :smile:

2

i get confused by this genre defining thing. like grime cant exactly be defined. its more of a movement.
like listen to old roll deep mixtapes and half the songs are bashment or hip hop instrumentals.
same with dubstep to an extant. it doesnt have defining characteristics exactly.

basically to me grime is garage without the house influences. sparser beats generally (but not necessarily) giving room for mcs over the top.
shoud be pretty obvious whats grime and what isnt though

1 BigUp
3

Yea, I mostly hate assiging certain songs to certain types of genres. But when I think of grime, no specific song pops up in my head. Thats why I wanted to know ^^

Thanks for the answer! :smile:

4

nah i dont mean there’s anything wrong with saying songs are part of a genre. nothing wrong with categorising stuff. i think its wrong to ascribe a particular charecteristic to a genre as it results in cookie cutter shit. tunes that define grime for me






2 Likes
5
6

Have a listen to a couple rinsefm grime show and spooky deja vu fm episodes

7

pulse kicks (those distorted bwaao ones) and square wave synths are pretty common, it’s mainly around 140 but can be as low as like 130 or up to 145 bpm and higher

lots of kinda strange drum programming, claps everywhere and strange samples, like all the weird bleeps and clangs in wiley’s tunes,
and mcing of course

these old roll deep sets are probably a good introduction for the vibe, some of the best mcs and beats

1 BigUp
8
9

To be fair they are like Dungeon or Tear out, inner movements of the whole as it were.

Its all wheels within wheels with this stuff

10

well put joe

i think if you know music theory you could probably point out the most common scales grime comes in (imo)

^shouldn’t be relevant that though

11

I think it’s a bit like dubstep. Generally minor with maybe some tritones thrown in for good measure.

1 BigUp
12

gnarly breakbeat hiphop influenced hard form of garage, kind of how dubstep is more-or-less a minimal version of garage in a sense, grime is more of a hard version of garage in a way, generally using very little sub and generally made for spitting bars over

13

very little sub you say?

14

compared to most dubstep yes, not always the case, but a lot of old wiley, danny weed, jon e cash, plasticman tunes didn’t. yes it had sub, but it wan’t very prominent.