Jump up
Jump up is the rowdy, bassline-led end of drum and bass: a bouncing two-step drum skeleton under a dominant mid-range bassline that carries the hook.
- Parent genre tempo 165 to 185 BPM
- Drum and bass emerged early 1990s
- Hospital Records founded 1996
Jump up is the rowdy end of drum and bass: the strand that strips the genre down to a bouncing two-step drum pattern and puts a dominant, distorted mid-range bassline where a vocal hook would otherwise sit.
The parent genre is sourced precisely: the English Wikipedia article on drum and bass, checked 2 September 2026, defines it as electronic dance music that emerged in the United Kingdom in the early 1990s, with fast breakbeats typically 165 to 185 beats per minute, heavy bass and sub-bass lines, samples and synthesizers. Jump up takes that engine and points every part of it at the dancefloor.
What jump up means in drum and bass
Jump up means the style named for what it does to a crowd: the drums bounce, the bassline talks, and the room jumps. As characterisation rather than statistics, 2 traits define it. The first is the drum skeleton, a two-step arrangement of kick and snare that swings rather than rushes, leaving space for the low end to move. The second is the bassline, pushed up into the mid-range where a PA system makes it snarl, written as a hook the way another genre would write a chorus, and often traded call-and-response against the drums. In a genre whose opposite end, liquid funk, is defined by added harmonies and melodies, jump up is the end defined by subtraction: fewer layers, more bounce, one bassline in charge.
What the words drum and bass mean
The words drum and bass name the genre's 2 raw materials: drum stands for the fast sampled or programmed breakbeat, and bass for the heavy bass and sub-bass lines beneath it. Drum and bass, drum n bass and dnb are 1 genre under 3 spellings, and the definition above covers them all. The tempo band of 165 to 185 BPM is the figure that holds the whole genre together: jump up, liquid funk and everything between run on it, which is why a DJ can move across the strands inside a single set. Where the strands differ is temperament, and jump up sits at the temperature the next section describes: the making of the track itself.
How a jump up track is made and mixed
To make a jump up drum and bass track, a producer programmes the two-step drum skeleton first, tightens the kick and snare until the bounce is steady, then designs the mid-range bassline as the lead voice, resampling and distorting it until it carries the record on its own; a clean sub-bass sits underneath so the low end still lands on a club system. To mix drum and bass in the DJ sense, match tempos inside the genre's 165 to 185 BPM band and swap records on the drop, which jump up's big, obvious basslines make easy to read. To mix in the studio sense, keep the kick, the snare and the mid-range bassline out of each other's way, since those 3 elements are practically the whole arrangement.
Bass drum questions, untangled from the genre
The bass drum questions that travel alongside this style name belong to the drum kit, not to jump up, and each has a short answer.
- A bass drum is the largest drum of the kit, the floor-standing instrument that supplies the low thump, played with a foot pedal rather than sticks.
- Bass drum triggers are sensors mounted on the head or rim that turn each hit into an electronic signal, letting an acoustic kick fire a sampled sound.
- Bass drum size is quoted by the diameter of the head, measured straight across the rim, with shell depth as the second figure.
- Tuning a bass drum means evening out the tension rods around the head until the pitch sits consistently where the player wants it.
- Playing a bass drum is pedal technique, heel up for power or heel down for control.
- Bass drum 1 is the label general-purpose notation and sound sets give the standard kick drum sound.
In the genre name, none of those parts appear: the drum of drum and bass is a sampled breakbeat, and the bass is an electronic sub-bass line, not an instrument on a riser.
Jump up next to liquid funk: the 2 ends of the genre
Jump up and liquid funk mark the 2 ends of drum and bass, and the contrast is the fastest way to place either one. Liquid drum and bass, also called liquid funk, is sourced as the subgenre with more instrumental layers, harmonies and melodies; Fabio, alongside Sarah Sandy, began championing it under that name in 1999 with a same-named compilation on their Creative Source label, and by 2005 it stood established among the genre's biggest-selling subgenres, with Hospital Records among its main labels. Jump up inverts that recipe: where liquid stacks harmony, jump up strips it away; where liquid lets melody lead, jump up hands the lead to the mid-range bassline. Both ends keep the parent's engine, which is why the comparison is one of temperament, not tempo.
Where Danny Byrd stands relative to jump up
Danny Byrd stands at the opposite end of drum and bass from jump up, and his chart record shows it. Byrd signed to Hospital Records in 1999 as one of the label's first artists, and his biggest singles are melodic ones: his remix of Liquid's "Sweet Harmony" reached No. 64 on the UK Singles Chart on 7 February 2010, and "Ill Behaviour" reached No. 36 on the UK Singles Chart later the same year. The rowdiest chart fact in his catalogue is "Red Mist VIP" at No. 1 on the UK Dance Chart in the week ending 25 July 2009, a record that then travelled into the film Dead Man Running and the games Midnight Club LA and DJ Hero. Energy, in other words, is not the dividing line between the strands; the bassline recipe is. Byrd delivers jump up levels of impact from the melodic side, which is exactly the contrast that makes the 2 ends of the genre worth naming.