If you were looking for innovation in hip-hop production in 2018, Ski Beatz wasn’t the obvious choice. Sure, the legendary New York producer was responsible for Jay Z’s classic 1996 debut Reasonable Doubt and Camp Lo’s 1997 fan favorite Uptown Saturday Night, but the veteran had long since settled into a rhythm of well-respected indie releases beloved for their authenticity rather than their innovation, like his Pilot Talk series with rapper Curren$y. So more than a few purists were left scratching their heads when Ski released Switched On Bap, a ten-track ode to Wendy Carlos’ 60s synth album Switched On Bach that explores the use of modular synthesizers in hip-hop beat-making. The album’s marriage of rap production’s rugged drum programming to synth music’s wildly evolving melodies generated through a mix of oscillators and control voltage—strategies far outside the usual looping of samples and banging of keys—wasn’t the first time someone made beats with patch cables, but it stood out as a veteran’s stamp of approval, shining light on the emerging movement known as modbap.
In a sense, modbap is the heir to beatmaking’s longstanding tradition of fucking around (with gear) and finding out (what kind of crazy sounds you can make), literally rewiring rigs to create sounds impossible to make with traditional instrumentation. “There was a handful of folks—my friends—doing something similar floating around in this [Eurorack] space,” said modbap pioneer Corry Banks, who coined the term in the mid-2010s. “That’s the common thing—people had a curiosity to get involved, to push the envelope.”
A play on the term “boom bap,” modbap is loosely defined, allowing for anything from glitchy, highly experimental material to more traditional rhythms set to ambient, generative washes of sound. Banks, who’s also behind the YouTube channel BBoy Tech Report, said the term just makes sense. “We’re all making hip-hop with synths even if they aren’t all the same beats—it’s modular boom bap or modular trap or synthesized hip-hop. I would talk to my man, he’d be on the psychedelic side, or someone else would have big drums and an industrial flavor. We realized there was a thread here and once I named it, given we were online and sharing stuff daily—people can go back [to YouTube streams/videos] to see my trajectory—then like minds gravitated to it from around the world.”
The genre really began taking shape between 2018 and 2020 as the first full albums and compilations emerged, attracting an audience beyond synthesizer players themselves. Banks’ Diggin In The Wires compilation, released digitally in 2021, followed by a full vinyl release in 2022, showcases some of the most impactful artists operating in the space, like VoltageCTRLR and Kipsky.
A cohort of tech-minded producers like Ali The Architect and Ben The Glorious Bastard have also emerged as major players in the scene, releasing music and video tutorials, forming a loose online community on Discord, as well as dropping YouTube and Twitch livestreams promoting booming, broken beats created through technology usually reserved for four on the floor techno and weightless ambient jams. The sound has even expanded internationally, with European producers SirCut and the aforementioned Kipsky developing and advancing “syntablism,” which combines modular synthesis with scratching and other turntable-based techniques.
What began as a casual entry in a group of friends’ private lexicon has now spread to the wider world, alongside the rise of modular synthesizers in the past decade. Banks is now the genre’s de facto standard bearer. In 2020, he founded Modbap Modular, which sells gear for producers working within the paradigm, including the Trinity drum module, the Osiris wavetable oscillator, and the Per4mer—which might best be described as the SP404’s FX section on steroids. Though Banks is quick to credit his predecessors like the Beat Thang, Modbap Modular’s status as the sole current Black-owned and operated music equipment manufacturer feels historically significant: 50 years after DJ Kool Herc found a new way to present music using turntables and a sound system, it’s only right that the hip-hop community would produce an equipment manufacturer catering to its specifics needs. Meanwhile, other manufacturers are following his lead, releasing mind-bending modbap products like Mystic Circuits’ iDum, which promises complex IDM rhythms made easy, and Making Sound Machines’ Stolperbeats, a drum sequencer bringing J Dilla-style micro-timing and swung rhythms to the masses.
Even among hip-hop’s mainstream, there are signs that people are paying attention to the possibilities of modular synthesis, with none other than Drake posting Instagram stories of Teezo Touchdown’s sizeable modular rig—a notable flex in a genre where superstars rarely highlight the nuts and bolts of music-making. While we’re (thankfully) unlikely to see an OVO-branded oscillator anytime soon, this sort of promotion can only benefit the scene, by inspiring the next generation of nerdy kids to explore the technology behind music-making.
“Ground Wire” by Ski Beatz
