Hello! long time no speak. I wonder if there are any other fans of Techstep here? Just in case you don’t know, it’s a sub-genre of Drum & Bass that appeared in the mid-90s that was characterised by a thick, dark and dystopian sound provided mainly by a heavily manipulated Reese Bass (a bassline sampled from Kevin Saunderson’s ‘Just Want Another Chance’) and a pitched down Amen break. Famous exponents are Ed Rush & Optical, Bad Company, Ram Trilogy, Trace, Dom & Roland, and almost the entire roster of the Renegade Hardware and No U Turn labels. These days it seems to have morphed into Neurofunk, which has more or less discarded the Amen break, and as a result can at times sound dangerously close to what I’d consider to be EDM or Brostep. (Caveat: I know very little about either EDM or Brostep, so I could be talking out of my backside.)

Here’s Bad Company’s Nitrous (er, direct click the bottom). It’s all good, but if you’re impatient to enter the darkness the fun really begins at 1.04. That WAAH-WAAH-WAAH sound is the Reese Bass. Then when the Amen break comes in, you can hear how it’s so » Continue Reading.