All You Need To Know About Garage Music

"House is Garage on a budget", said the Paradise Garage proprietor.

The Paradise Garage was a venue in New York City that open heartedly accepted gay and lesbian community. People of all color and sizes were welcome and this very much contributed to the music we all know today. At Paradise Garage, music was utmost important. The venue had a sound of its own. The DJs who played at the Garage (which included the likes of Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston, Madonna, etc.) altogether established a new genre and any regular at Garage would call that music "the Garage record". The music often inculcated live instruments and orchestra elements and had big, soulful vocals and heavier R&B and funk influences than house music.

Whenever the sound of Paradise Garage is discussed, there is one name that surfaces all the conversations, DJ Larry Levan. He was known for his connect with the crowd, his taste and style, his mixes and his contribution to the venue even on the days when he was not performing. His DJing techniques stay unconventional to this day.

UK Garage

In the late 1980s, British DJs started playing disco and house tracks at higher tempos to mix well with the Jungle and Drum and Bass (DnB) tracks. This gave birth to what today's electronic musicians and fans refer to as 'Garage'. Artists like Cole, Groove Chronicles and Wookie started producing records in this genre which had the trademark '2-step' rhythm. The music also inculcated a mix match of kick drum, bass and vocal samples. The genre started as an underground scene and had a specific characteristic sound with tempo around 130 BPM and kick, snare and hi-hat following a (1/16) swing triplets as the main template.

The music was sassy and mostly had female vocals often coming from slower RnB tracks, time stretched to fit the tempo. It was bumpy and cheeky in a way that it was created with different sections chucked in one after the other. Time changes between different sections became a characteristic sound. Records like Gabrielle by Davis Junior, RipGroove by Double 99 and Colours by Stephen Emmanuel defined the whole UK Garage sound.

The UK garage become commercial and mainstream by the end of 90s and artists like 'So Solid Crew' and 'Ms Dynamite' rose. The music was ideal for the MCs to rap over and it laid down the foundation for 'Grime'. The UK Garage scene almost crashed during the early 2000s as new sounds like Grime and Dubstep started surfacing. “It kinda rose up very quickly and then it became a dirty word overnight,” says MJ Cole. Years passed and dubstep saw a similar decline in popularity as it predecessor and today Garage is one of the most solid forms of electronic music with a solid fan base all over the world.