5 Amateur Dubstep Songs Worth Listening To

Dubstep as a music genre has risen up pretty quickly in the past few years. What started out as someone accidentally recording their fax machine at a Metallica concert is now a fully fleshed type of music with a thousands of followers.

This is partly since dubstep is relatively easy to make, you don’t need years of classical training or a good voice. All it takes is experience with a sound manipulation software (some you can even find free online) and suddenly you’re a dubstep “producer”. Unfortunately, this means that any and everyone now wants to get famous fast, and do so by making terrible dubstep. But once in a while, you get amateur dubstep remixes of popular songs that sound as good as electronic screamo ever will.

5) Paradise- Coldplay (Glebstar Remix)

DJ Glebstar is pretty popular on Youtube, his songs have 16 million cumulative views. So its no surprise that he was able to dubstepify a Coldplay song. The song itself diverts from the usual dirty dubstep route and has no clear bass drop. But considering that the original song is like, the definition of mellow, the remix is right in place. Plus, its a lot harder to make clean dubstep, because that involves actual producing (as opposed to a recording of a Transformer thrashing around). Our only negative is that the background synth can get kind of repetitive.

4) Heads will Roll- Yeah Yeah Yeahs (Optic Remix)

A lot of dubstep remixes sound terrible because they skip right to the bass drop, introducing your ears to a world of agony. Keen listeners will notice that most dubstep songs, whether it be a Bassnectar or a Skrillex, ease in to the heavy stuff slowly. Your mind needs time to register that you just put dubstep on even though “it sounds so terrible, who even listens to this crap, you guys”. Optic does that here, by starting off with the actual chorus of the song, and then basing the bass on the music from the original.

The drop comes with the end of the chorus, so anyone who doesn’t listen to dubstep won’t turn off their speakers in disgust. Remixes like Optic’s are really good at getting people to listen to dubstep. They attain the bass and drum and synth you hear in hardcore dubstep, but they also retain a huge portion of the original song. People tend to like something more if they are comfortable with it.

3) Skrillex, Feed Me, deadmau5 F-ing Die 2 The Stars (Mashup by PlusFour)

Normally, I (or anyone else for that matter) wouldn’t consider a mashup as an original, much less real dubstep. But in my opinion, dubstep is verstaile enough that you could take 3 or 4 songs and mash them to make what is definitely your’s. Also, we refuse to say IMO. That’s what PlusFour did here, and everywhere else on his YouTube page. If you listen to dubstep, you can subjectively tell if a song is good or not depending on basically how well everything blends together, because that’s what producing is. The real professionals can make dirty dubstep all day long, but only because they have thousand dollar machines.

So when amateurs try it, they usually suck hard. I’m pretty sure the “dubstep sucks” crowd started when someone youtubed “dubstep” (because smart people usually search for entire genres, duh), heard an amateur track and declared war on the whole genre. With the exception of Skrillex’s Cinema, nothing really sounds like a fax machine. Anyway, our point is that PlusFour basically makes a skilled hardcore dubstep track by mixing 3 other songs. You can’t even hear the individual tracks in there.

2) Super Bass (Mashup by PlusFour)

Right, he’s on the list twice. Hear us out. A lot of times, we’ll hear a song on the radio and think, “Damn, this would sound awesome dubstepified”. Then immediatly, we would go to youtube to check if Tiesto or Skrillex or someone has done it for us. Instead, we’d find a bunch of amateur remixes, most of which suck. They always suck for the same reason too, in an effort to get everything at 140 bpm they speed up the vocals accidentally turning the song into “Alvin in the Chipmunks play a Rave.”

Most amateurs think this is acceptable since that’s how Skrillex did it in his Levels remix, but it sounds like otter crap (haha, see what I did there). Super Bass is one of those songs that we wish was remixed professionally. Thankfully, PlusFour showed us how it would have been if deadmau5 and Skrillex teamed up. That’s how well this song is, it sounds as though they both did this, not some guy on Youtube. I’d consider this another great track to convert someone to dubstep.

1) Alejandro ft. Lady Gaga (Skrillex Remix)

Oh man, I am well aware that if anyone reading this is a hardcore dubstep fan (like, an avid fan. Not a fan of dirty dubstep) then they’d kill me for this. Because for one, Skrillex is no amateur, for two screw him- he won 3 grammys. But his Alejandro (and Bad Romance) remixes were created by an amateur Skrillex. A man living illegally in a warehouse in LA using one laptop and blown speakers.

This and the other unreleased tracks launched him to stardom, brought dubstep into the mainstream (for better or for worse), and solidified the genre (oh god, that’s gonna piss people off). That’s why its on this list. In this track, Skrillex manages to make a  new bass line that he merges with the original song, uses Lady Gaga’s vocals to form a beat, and has a pretty sick drop (albiet not quite CALL 911 NOW!!).

Mohammed Shariff likes Skrillex and isn’t afraid to say it (unless you happen to be really pretty).