Amapiano Late Shift

Late Shift is for the hours after the peak, when the room has thinned out and the tempo drops to a walk. Soft, swung, and heavy underneath. The log drum is the pack. It is not a tuned percussion sitting inside a groove - it is the bass line, and it is written that way. Fifty four melodic loops across all ten keys, with the three-three-two syncopation the genre is built on, plus forty eight one shots spanning four registers from a 41 Hz sub to a 330 Hz top. The note falls into place instead of starting on it: the portamento takes three and a half times longer to settle than a straight percussive hit, and that slide is the signature. Twelve characters, from the round and hollow to the saturated and the folded. The shaker is the other half. It gets its own folder rather than being filed under generic tops, because a dense sixteenth-note bed is what holds an amapiano track together, and burying it with the congas hides it. Forty two loops of it, sitting three and a half decibels further forward in the mix than any pack we have released. The drums are written for this tempo, not borrowed from a faster one. Twelve groove recipes, and not one of them puts the kick on every beat - the three-three-two lands on steps one, seven and thirteen and leaves the rest of the bar open. The clap is often simply absent, which in this genre is the norm and not an omission: the two and the four belong to the shaker and the log drum. Swing runs from 0.11 to 0.20, wider than anything else in our catalogue. The keys are the other thing the genre is named for. Seventy two chord and stab loops on an electric piano model - a tine struck by a soft hammer, read by a pickup, with the panning tremolo running slow underneath. The voicings carry sevenths and ninths, because a three-note chord here sounds like house, not like amapiano. The chords sit on the beat and the stabs land off it. Twenty four pads, sixty six vocal chops and one shots, ten risers and ten downers, and a full percussion bank - congas, bongos, woodblocks, rimshots and toms, all of them played soft, on open shells. What makes all of it different is how it was made. Every sound is synthesised from scratch by our own DSP code, not sampled. No re-licensed libraries, nothing to clear. That makes the pack original, and it means whatever you build with it is yours.