Big beat is an electronic music genre characterised by heavy breakbeats and synthesizer-generated loops and patterns, similar to those found in acid house and techno. The term has been used by the British music industry to describe music by artists such as The Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, the Crystal Method, Propellerheads, Basement Jaxx, and Groove Armada.
Big beat reached mainstream success during the 1990s, with its critical and commercial peak between 1995 and 1999.
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Big beat is an electronic music genre characterised by heavy breakbeats and synthesizer-generated loops and patterns, similar to those found in acid house and techno. The term has been used by the British music industry to describe music by artists such as The Prodigy, the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim, the Crystal Method, Propellerheads, Basement Jaxx, and Groove Armada.
Big beat reached mainstream success during the 1990s, with its critical and commercial peak between 1995 and 1999. Notable releases from this period include the Chemical Brothers’ "Dig Your Own Hole", The Prodigy's "The Fat of the Land", and Fatboy Slim's "You've Come a Long Way, Baby". The genre saw a decline from around 2001 onwards.
The style of big beat features heavy and distorted drum beats at tempos between 100 and 140 beats per minute, Roland TB-303 synthesiser lines similar to acid house, and heavy loops sampled from 1960s and 1970s funk, soul, jazz, and rock songs. Tracks often include punk-style vocals or rap, driven by intense, distorted synthesiser basslines and structured with conventional pop, house, and techno arrangements. Big beat compositions typically incorporate crescendos, builds, drops, extended drum rolls, and various sound effects such as spoken word samples, dialogues from film and TV, Middle Eastern strings or sitars, explosions, air horns, sirens, and gunshots. Effects like filters, phasing, and flanging were commonly used.
Pioneers of the genre, such as Fatboy Slim, frequently use heavily compressed loud breakbeats, which are central to defining the sound alongside melodic hooks and sampled sounds. Big beat shares attributes with jungle and drum and bass, particularly the use of loud, heavy breakbeats and basslines, but it generally features a slower tempo.
