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Dubstep grew out of UK garage.

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Dubstep might be the genre that everyone's talking about at the moment, but unless you're on the scene, you might struggle to describe how it sounds.

There are two primary characteristics. Firstly, it's driven by a high-tempo bassline (138-142bpm as a standard), but with syncopated, shuffling beats that appear to play back at half tempo and loop over two bars instead of one.

And secondly, as the 'dub' part of its name suggest, it's largely instrumental.

As with any style of music, though, these things aren't written entirely in stone. Sometimes you get vocals; increasingly, you get MCs performing over the top; the basslines aren't always fast; and very occasionally you get a four-four kick drum.

These are the basics – now let's look at some specific things you can do to improve the quality of your dubstep productions.

For an in-depth guide to producing dubstep, check out issue 132 of Computer Music magazine, on sale now.

1. Don't neglect the beats
Dubstep beats are almost always lazily syncopated. The snares and other hits generally occur slightly later than you'd expect in other breakbeat-driven genres, which often gives them a broken beat and almost disjointed vibe, acting as the perfect contrast to the faster basslines. Try nudging them manually or using channel delay.

2. Pitch your drums down
Dubstep often uses slightly distorted and degraded sounds, and one of the best ways to give drums an edgy quality is to simply pitch them down. You'll be at an advantage if you use a drum sampler such as NI's Battery, as pitching drum samples down requires shifting start points and tightening envelopes to ensure that they stay punchy.

"Part of the charm and character of dubstep is that it's not the most polished or overly processed sound, which means that it's ideal for those on a budget."

3. Hit some black keys
The key to creating authentic musical parts is to focus on the darker side of music theory! Minor key and diminished chords are the order of the day. But if you're not classically trained, there's another simple rule of thumb – black keys make everything sound a little darker, so try to include them in all of your chords and riffs.

4. Stretch and shift
You can add some additional grime to your percussive loops by recording a section, timestretching it and/or pitchshifting it (Ableton Live is a great tool for this, but make sure you deliberately use lower quality settings) and then resampling, ReCycling and re-importing them all into your track.

5. Slow things down
You can use the legato function on your ReCycled basslines to ensure they slide convincingly, but this only works if the slices are long enough. It's often useful to timestretch any bass or musical loops so that they're a couple of BPM slower than your basic tempo before ReCycling, so that the slices overlap when played back faster.