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→Song Production Information: English translation of "VOL.1 BREAK-BTS" on Music Column section of website for beatmania CS / APPEND YebisuMIX.
(New English translations for Song Production Information (original Japanese source: beatmania 2ndMIX Complete Soundtrack Booklet)) |
(→Song Production Information: English translation of "VOL.1 BREAK-BTS" on Music Column section of website for beatmania CS / APPEND YebisuMIX.) |
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=== beatmania completeMIX English site === | === beatmania completeMIX English site === | ||
A "gorgeous" track for all you break beats fans. | A "gorgeous" track for all you break beats fans. | ||
=== beatmania CS / APPEND YebisuMIX Music Column site === | |||
==== [[Hiroyuki Togo]] ==== | |||
"Just what the heck is 'BREAK-BTS' (breakbeats)?"<br> | |||
"I know what reggae and techno are, but I've never heard of a genre like 'breakbeats'"... that's probably what a lot of you are thinking. | |||
Even someone like me who's involved in sound production has only recently started hearing "breakbeats" as a genre name. It turns out that it was originally used to refer to a music production technique. | |||
Originating in the 1980s with groups like YMO, techno took the bold idea of making computers perform music and created sounds which had never been heard before.<br> | |||
These inorganic beats, carved out at very precise tempos that flesh-and-blood humans couldn't imitate, sounded very cutting-edge at the time. Aside from those who enjoyed this new thing, there were also a lot of people who reacted negatively to these mechanical sounds (... actually, I was one of those people back when I was a high school student).<br> | |||
Techno didn't just limit itself to influencing music, but also fashion and culture.<br> | |||
It even ended up drastically changing how music was produced up to that point. | |||
But around the end of the '80s and into the '90s, when people had gotten tired of hearing mechanical rhythms, a technique called "breakbeats" was born.<br> | |||
The technique uses a sampler (machine that records live sound and turns it into a musical instrument) to capture the sounds of someone playing drums for one to four measures (a lot of them were recorded off of analog records from the '60s-'70s in particular) and then play them back. To those whose hearing had become polluted (?) by mechanical rhythms, subtle grooves played by people were conversely refreshing and pleasant. The continuous repetition of rhythm patterns consisting of a few measures gave way to new rhythmic sensations, and sophisticated sound creators gradually began to incorporate this technique.<br> | |||
In the present day, there's a variety of know-how about not just playing back the rhythm patterns, but also finely sequencing them with other rhythm sounds, crossing two rhythm patterns with each other, or changing the key before playing it back, among others. | |||
To make a long story short, that's how the term "breakbeats" was originally used. | |||
I'm not sure when that started to be used as the genre name "breakbeats," but perhaps record companies did it so they could make it easier to sell CDs, without really understanding what the term means... that might not be too far off from the truth though, right? (Recently, too many genre names don't make sense!)<br> | |||
To all of you out there, don't feel embarrassed just because there's a genre name you don't know about!<br> | |||
After all, as time goes by, some of these newly minted genre names will be weeded out, while others will become different names. | |||
''Until next time, have a wonderful BEAT PLAY LIFE.''<br> | |||
''(Hiroyuki Togo, Composer & Sound Director for ''beatmania'' on PlayStation)'' | |||
== Video Production Information == | == Video Production Information == | ||