- Hello there!
Ever since I told people to send me
their deepest desires and video ideas,
I've received a ton of messages
both on Discord and YouTube.
So let's look at them.
(clapping)
(horn honking)
(light popping)
Yeah.
For example, this one
by a user called Phuzzy.
"Dab for 1,000 subs."
Well, what about this
one by a different user.
"My earwax is gone thanks to this video."
Well, there must be
something in this huge pile
of obviously only comments, right?
(static grinding)
Oh my lord, how did I
not notice this huge,
bafflingly-mysterious chest with the words
Forgotten Video Requests written on it?
Let's open it.
So in here, a bunch of, wait a second.
I thought everyone stopped asking for it,
but apparently, you people
can't stop begging for this one,
god damned specific topic of
the Art Of The Neuro Bass.
Well, this is a heavily requested topic
I never felt ready enough
to make a video about,
but I mean, you're already here
and it seems like my fate
has decided to punish me
into making a video, so
let me show you something.
(intense music)
(screen blows raspberry)
Oh, does that sometimes.
(intense music)
(moving into gentle upbeat music)
♪ Say you want ♪
- [Narrator] The emergence of a genre.
(graphics bleeping)
(gentle music)
- How are new genres born?
Imagine there is a group of people
who all create somewhat similar music.
Nobody really stands out on a larger scale
and everybody slaps the exact
same label on their work.
Now, it's totally normal
for genres to evolve.
People come up with new ideas
and musical concepts all the time,
and other people get inspired by it
and adapt to the changes in
the industry and all of that.
So the bubble follows.
But sometimes, people get
so creative and inventive
with their new concepts, that it deviates
from the original values and definitions
of a genre
(bubble rustles and pops)
and well, bursts out the bubble.
Then people start giving
this new stuff a new name
and thus, a new genre has been born.
All of this sounds like a
lovely and solid concept,
but the reality is, as
often, much more complex,
nuanced, and blurry than that.
I mean, of course people
want to stick out,
have different styles in the same genre
and just experiment a lot.
Anyone can just come up with a new name
and label their music with it,
but when do we cross the point
at which other people start
recognizing that label
as a new genre instead of just
your own musical, weird style?
Well, there's actually no answer to this
because it's a all get gray area
and we just accept some genres
as legit, established genres
and go on with our lives.
Just like many other concepts,
the acceptance of certain genres
is just the result of society
and the nature of human trends,
so it can't be precisely tracked
and defined with solid
and hard boundaries.
Many genres also overlap
a lot with other genres
and it makes things just
even more complicated and.
(horn squeals)
As you can see, the reality
of genre terminology
is way too complex for us humans
to fully understand and comprehend.
I'll draw a little graph
for you, one second.
(screen rumbling)
It's a mess, it's a huge fucking mess.
(tense music)
Now some of you might say, "Hey Wangle,
"what about machine learning?
'I bet computers can put our music
"way better into categories
than us puny humans."
And yes, so there are plenty
of approaches on this,
but after spending many, many nights
reading through these tediously
fancy research papers,
I can without a doubt conclude that
its such a fucking mess.
(inspirational music)
♪ Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah ♪
(screen beeps)
So, how are these genres born?
Like, how was Neurofunk born?
How was Neurohop and Neurostep born?
Explain.
(screen beeps)
Okay, so usually I would
start answering this question
by looking at an already
established and existing genre
and tracking down the roots from there,
how it evolved and changed and all that.
But I feel like slapping the word neuro
in front of an existing genre.
It's kind of a different case.
It's not the same, you know.
And you're right,
Neurohop is the Glitchhop,
but with more interesting basses.
Neurostep is the Dubstep, but
with more interesting basses.
And Neurofunk is mainly Drum & Bass,
but with more interesting basses.
I'm pretty certain that these neuro genres
are still mostly their
old, respective genres,
but with a large focus on bass design.
Please keep in mind that this is not
the real definition of these genres,
but it's still a good
mindset to work with,
especially if you want to describe
what all this neuro stuff is really about,
motion.
(text crackling)
(gentle upbeat music)
♪ Say you want ♪
- [Narrator] The Rise Of Motion
(screen bleeps)
(gentle music)
- We live in a world in
which the online presence
of super fast beat
making, music production
with harsh time constraints
and minimalist challenges
is pretty prominent.
I mean, don't get me wrong,
these challenges are amazing things
anyone is completely free to do.
Heck, even I made videos
about these exact challenges.
But my point is that we also can
go into the complete opposite direction
and embrace the complexity,
build details upon details,
and just go crazy with it,
even if it turns out that
we need a lot of time
to finish our projects in this fashion.
In the world of the neuro genres,
this complexity is not equally spread
onto all aspects of the music,
but it is especially focused onto,
as you may have guessed, the basses.
In the early days of neuro music,
that being somewhere around 1997,
the artists of that genre were aiming
to make extremely harsh
and aggressive basses.
I think that their attempt for it.
(intense Neurofunk music)
Yeah, harsh and aggressive.
Over time, people started
experimenting in this genre,
like fucking Jumba from "Lilo & Stitch"
and not long after all of this started,
we experienced a change.
The focus slowly but steadily shifted
from trying to sound super rad
to showing what we can do with basses.
And to explain why I'm
so god damned passionate
about this little sentence right here,
I have to tell you a
short little story about
me and a couple of friends.
(gentle intense music)
♪ Say you want ♪
- [Narrator] The meaning of bass.
(screen buzzing)
- About once a week, usually on weekends,
a few people from my
family and some friends
meet up over at our place.
We play games, chat about random stuff,
and generally just hang
out and enjoy ourselves.
And while we do share many similarities,
we also are pretty different
in our very own ways.
One of these lovely
people is my cousin Andi.
Andi is, I asked my sister
to explain his personality
and her only response was,
"He's very direct.
"When he dislikes something
he will say it out loud
"and he generally doesn't give a care
"about anything in the world."
And I'm pretty used to
him not really caring
about anything that I work on,
whenever he happens to be in my room
and I'm editing a video, for example.
But one time, when he arrived early
and no one else was at home,
he stuck around in my
room and asked questions.
Like, genuine questions about the video
and he even wanted to know
what some of the jokes
in the video were about.
And at one point, he
just slowly turned to me
and asked a question that literally
stuck with me up until now.
(gentle music)
- [Andi] What is the bass even for?
- If you've been following
other musicians here on YouTube,
know people who play in a band,
or even play music with
other people yourself,
you'll probably know of the running joke
that nobody cares about
bass guitar players,
that bassists are often left out and well,
very far in the back on the stage.
In a somewhat recent video by Adam Neely,
other band members even started talking
while not realizing that he was
performing a bass solo for the crowd.
And even while writing this script
and telling my sister about all of this,
she just pointed out to me that it's funny
how my cheap cardboard prop bass
is constantly hidden in my wall.
Like, that's ironic, isn't it?
And to answer my cousin's question,
"What is the bass even for?"
I came up with a little analogy.
Imagine a book.
You've got words, meanings,
styles of writing,
interactions between characters,
and even the font and
the smell of the paper.
But what no one talks about
is the spine of the book.
It's boring, it's just there to hold stuff
and look fancy if it's well designed.
No matter what book you read,
it's always there and it's always there
to hold everything together.
Your hands are empty
without the book's spine.
And a band sounds empty without the bass.
And to get all the way
back to the beginning
of this stupid little thing,
when we slap neuro in front of a word,
we don't just say that our
basses are neatly designed
and good sounding and all that,
but we imply that we care about the bass.
Many artists whose work
exists in these genres
even use the term bass design
when talking about their craft
to imply that there is an indeed
an incredible amount of love
put into the little low-frequency worlds
they create with their own hands.
And to get even further back
what we can do with basses,
this is why I'm so passionate
about all of this garbage.
In most other genres, no one gives
a single shit about basses, but here
in the lovely little world of, hey,
let's slap neuro in front of
every fucking word in the dictionary,
we show, that yes, you can do
otherworldy things with them
and yes, we do enjoy a good rumble.
That's exactly why I consume
copious amounts of Neurofunk
every single day and that's
also why I annoy my sister
with my weird musical
obsessions all the time.
Thank you, thank you for listening
through my garbage essay
about that weird little
niche pile of genres and
thank you for possibly
and hopefully realizing I'm
thinking way too much into this.
In the end, it's just a
thought I wanted to talk about
and I hope you enjoyed
this video nonetheless.
If you did enjoy this project,
maybe consider becoming a Patreon
and support the show a little bit
so I can keep making videos
and building dumb sets
in my mother's living room and
talk about a bunch of crap.
Special thanks to all my current Patreons,
ThatsMyJam, Fen Carter, ScotcherDev,
BENI.MARU, keycattie, Chantmagick,
Sora, and ForenzaAudio
for supporting the channel
and keeping this garbage alive.
So thank you very much and bye!
(gentle music)
