How Kwaito Was Made: The Pitch Fader, the Speed Switch and a Tempo Nobody Chose

Pantsula dancers in a circle on a tarred township street, knees high, spectators ringed around them, shot in black and white.

Minus two to minus eight. That is the whole invention. Johannesburg DJs took imported house records, put the pitch fader down between two and eight percent, and a genre came out the other side. Ask how kwaito was made and the honest first answer is not a synth or a sampler. It is a fader, moved down, by hand, on a deck in a shebeen in the early 1990s.

Then it happened again. Twenty-five years later, township DJs took house records at 125 and played them at 115, and that became amapiano. The man who says so is Kabza De Small, and he says it on Oskido's own show, which is about as neat as music history ever gets.

This is a gear blog, so the mechanism comes first. Where the machines are documented we name them. Where they are not, and for kwaito they mostly are not, we say so rather than filling the hole with plausible-sounding hardware.

How kwaito was made: two ways to slow a record down

Almost everything written about kwaito says it is house slowed to about 110bpm. True. What almost nothing says is that two separate techniques were in use, they were not interchangeable, and they land in different places.

The pitch fader

Greg Bowes, for Boiler Room in February 2015, describes producers redoing international tracks "in the way they were being heard at clubs and in the township's drinking spots, the shebeens: pitched at anywhere between minus two and minus eight." That is Bowes narrating, not a producer quoted. Oskido supplies the testimony himself, to Mixmag in November 2024:

Back in the day, we were playing a lot of US house music and records from London and around Europe. Frankie Knuckles, Tony Humphreys, you know. Guys like Louis Vega, of course. Masters At Work, David Morales stuff. It was a niche, vinyl market, but these were the records we played in the shabeens (township bars). We would pitch the records down as the slower tempo was a more natural fit with South African dancers.

And the target: "The kwaito BPM was around 110, and we needed to speed that up for the rest of the world." Do the arithmetic. A 120bpm house record at minus eight percent is 110.4bpm. At minus two it is 117.6. The range Bowes gives and the tempo Oskido names are the same fact, seen from either end of the fader.

The speed switch

The other method is cruder and much more extreme. Black Coffee, in his Red Bull Music Academy lecture in Montreal in 2016, told Lauren Martin: "we used to take records that were 45 RPM, and slow them down, and play them on 33 RPM, just to get that slowness and that groove."

That is a 25 percent drop, not an eight percent one. Forty-five divided by thirty-three and a third is 1.35, so a 128bpm twelve inch played at 33 arrives at about 95bpm, which is the figure Mixmag published in May 2024. A 120bpm record lands near 89.

So these are not variations on one idea. The fader gets you to 110. The speed switch gets you into the nineties. Anyone writing that kwaito is "house at 33 instead of 45" has quietly lost twenty beats per minute. Black Coffee's tempo bracket in the same lecture is the giveaway: "For the longest time, our dance music was on that tempo, like 105. If it was fast, then it's 114, and that's it." Martin asked whether 114 was too fast. He said yes.

Oskido describes the 45 trick too, in a line Mixmag printed in a state that does not quite parse: "we used to slow it down to fit our groove, especially with the stuff that was coming from London, because, you know it was becoming faster. We called the 'style 45'." On its own it is gibberish. Next to Black Coffee's lecture it is obvious.

One observation, clearly marked as ours

A standard Technics SL-1200, from the MK2 onwards, has a pitch fader that travels plus or minus eight percent. The plus or minus sixteen percent button does not arrive until the MK5G in 2002. So minus eight is not a number anyone chose. It is the fader on the stop.

Which means that a 120bpm record, pushed as far down as the deck physically allows, arrives at 110.4bpm, and that is the tempo Oskido names for an entire genre.

To be very clear, that is our arithmetic and nobody else's. No source we found names which turntables were in those rooms, and none connects the travel of a pitch fader to the tempo of kwaito. It is an observation, not a fact. It is also the most interesting thing in this article, which is exactly why it needs the warning label.

What kwaito inherited

Kwaito did not appear in an empty country. The 1980s had bubblegum: synth-driven township pop, Brenda Fassie, Yvonne Chaka Chaka, Sello "Chicco" Twala, Splash. The majors were not interested when the new thing arrived. Oskido: "We went to EMI with some early material and asked if they could sign the record. They said, 'No, this isn't going to sell'. So we went and made our own cassettes."

The room most of it went through was RPM Studios at 62 Goud Street, Johannesburg, founded in 1979 by Matt Mann and Dan Hill. Gallo bought it, and the RPM Record Company, in 1982. The name changed to Downtown Studios in 1990 according to the studio's own history page, or 1991 according to the musicologist Sheldon Rocha Leal. We cannot settle which. Downtown also turns up in our continental multitrack timeline, if you want the track counts.

One correction, because it gets repeated. Rocha Leal lists as Downtown's notable achievement that "Paul Simon recorded his Grammy-winning album at the facility in 1987." The Johannesburg Graceland sessions were at Ovation Studios, from February 1985, Roy Halee engineering, and the record came out in 1986. Wrong studio and wrong year in one sentence.

The other bubblegum trap is "Weekend Special". The South African original is 1983 on CCP, produced by Mally Watson and Blondie Makhene. The version most people have heard is the 1986 Capitol LP, cut in New York, with Van Gibbs credited for "Arranger, Emulator, Producer, Remixing, Synthesizer". That Emulator credit is the only named sampler in the 1980s South African orbit, and it is on a Brooklyn session.

The names, the labels and the dates

Dates in kwaito writing are unusually unreliable. Here is what checks out.

Fact Date
999 Music founded by Arthur Mafokate, named after his family's house number 1992
Kalawa formed by Oskido, Don Laka and Christos Katsaitis 1993
Kalawa Jazmee formed, after Katsaitis left and Jazmee merged in 1994
Arthur, "Kaffir", on CCP 1995
Trompies formed; Sigiya Ngengoma 1995
Mdu Masilela's "Hey Kop" EP 1995
Boom Shaka's kwaito "Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika" at the SAMAs; YFM launches 1997
TKZee, Halloween and "Shibobo" 1998
Mandoza, Nkalakatha, produced by Gabi "Ibomvu" Le Roux 2000

Three of those contradict things you will read elsewhere. Boiler Room dates "Kaffir" to 1993; Discogs, Wikipedia and the 1001 South African Songs entry all say 1995. Several sources say the success of "Kaffir" paid for 999 Music, but the label's own site says 1992, and Sunday World ran "999 Music turns 21" in November 2013. And the sales figure for "Kaffir" is either 150,000 or 500,000 depending which page you open.

What machines made kwaito? Mostly, nobody wrote it down

We went looking for kwaito production setups the way we would for any other genre: producer interviews, label pages, Discogs credits, academic work, the South African music press, Red Bull Music Academy, Resident Advisor, Bandcamp Daily, Afropop. For a genre that sold in the hundreds of thousands, the equipment record is close to empty.

There is exactly one named rig. Thami Mdluli, who recorded as Professor Rhythm, was in the 1980s groups Taboo and CJB and an in-house producer for Eric Frisch and Tusk before going solo in 1985. When Awesome Tapes From Africa reissued his mid-nineties album Bafana Bafana in October 2017, the notes said it was made with "a Roland MC-500 sequencer and Yamaha DX7, Juno 60 and Korg M1 keyboards, with the extensive help of studio engineer Nick Heaton."

Four outlets printed that, all four from the same label press text, so it is one source repeated and we attribute it to Awesome Tapes rather than stating it flat. It is still the best evidence in the subject: a named sequencer, three named keyboards, a named engineer, and an artist spanning bubblegum and early kwaito. Mdluli on what changed: "Once Mandela was released from prison and people felt more free to express themselves and move around town, kwaito was becoming the thing."

The Juno-60 in that list is the one we can put in front of you, and we wrote the whole comparison with its successor, including the chip that kills the later one.

Beyond that, generic claims only. Bandcamp Daily says the instruments "were the same as what you'd find in any top of the range '80s studio, Yamaha DX7s, and Juno synthesizers", which is attached to no producer and no record, and is not sourced. It may well be right. It is not evidence.

Why the record is empty

Kwaito was made in home rooms and hired hours, by people the trade press was not interviewing, in a country the gear magazines did not cover, on equipment that kept getting stolen. That last part is not us being colourful. Gavin Steingo's ethnography Kwaito's Promise (University of Chicago Press, 2016) is the only serious fieldwork on how these tracks were built, and his principal subject in Soweto is "restricted to the space of his own home because leaving his music equipment (desktop computer, speakers, and bass guitar) unguarded almost guarantees its theft". Music travelled by "the physical exchange of old hard drives, which are likely to corrupt files, fail completely, or disappear".

The only glimpse we found inside a kwaito label's room is a burglary. In August 2013, 999 Music's Midrand studio lost R400,000 of equipment. No inventory was published. That is the state of the archive.

The records they were slowing down, and what those were made on

This section is about Chicago, New York and London, not Johannesburg, and we are labelling it because the machines below get routinely and wrongly attached to kwaito itself. We found no evidence that any of them was used by a South African kwaito producer.

The canon Oskido names is American and European: Frankie Knuckles, Tony Humphries, Louie Vega, Masters At Work, David Morales, with Robin S as Boiler Room's reference for an early cover. That music was built on Roland drum machines, the TR-909 above all and the cheaper TR-707 and TR-808 alongside it, on the LinnDrum, and on samplers like the Akai S950 and the Ensoniq EPS 16 Plus. We have no 909, for the record.

Those are the records that got pitched down. They are not the records kwaito producers made.

What came after, in three movements

Afro house, and a mouse

Black Coffee, born Nkosinathi Maphumulo in 1976, lost the use of his left arm in a car incident at a Mandela release celebration on 11 February 1990. He founded Soulistic Music in 2005 alongside his debut album, which carries the best gear anecdote in modern South African music, and it is an anti-gear anecdote: "I produced the whole album using a mouse, literally. I'd write down the chords. I'd sing the bass line with my mouth, and then literally write them down with a mouse. I had no keyboard to play when I made this album."

He never names the software. Twenty years later he has a Grammy for Subconsciously.

Gqom, Durban, and a laptop in a dark room

Gqom comes out of Durban, particularly Clermont, from around 2011. The word imitates a kick drum. Two producers have given hard tempo figures. DJ Lag, to DJ Mag in September 2021: "Gqom was about 127 to 128bpm, now it's changed to 123 to 124bpm; it's slower so that you can do all those amapiano moves." Distruction Boyz, to Afropop in July 2018: "So if the song was at 130, we came and took it down a few paces. Maybe 128, 127 maybe 126."

Notice what keeps happening. Every genre in this article gets slower, and the practitioners are the ones saying so.

On tools the producers are unambiguous, in the first person. DJ Lag: "FL Studio is the one for me. I'm never ever gonna change, I love that software, man." He was given it by a local studio owner a year before he owned a computer that could run it, and bought his first MIDI controller during the pandemic, a decade into his career. Citizen Boy: "I just got like monitors, laptop, like the proper, not exactly proper, basic studio stuff", plus a Maschine Jam from Native Instruments, which he finds "quite difficult". Distruction Boyz on why that software: "When we started, it was the only software accessible to us because we come from really disadvantaged backgrounds."

That is the citable version of the FL Studio story, and it is about cost and access, in the producers' own words. The widely repeated claim about cracked copies traces back to a single unsourced parenthetical in one 2017 article. We are leaving it there.

Amapiano, and a log drum nobody has described

The gesture, performed a second time. Kabza De Small, on Joy Ride With Oskido in October 2021: "You know how Amapiano started? The township DJs play a song with 125 beats per minute [BPM]. Then you would find other DJ's play the same beat at 115 BPM."

DJ Maphorisa puts the finished genre at "between 110 BPM to 115 BPM". Which is kwaito's tempo, arrived at by kwaito's method, twenty-five years later.

Dancers mid-step on the pavement outside a township corner shop under a bright blue sky, a crowd of friends watching from behind them
Dancers on a pavement outside a corner shop, a crowd watching from behind; the slowing described here was done twice, twenty-five years apart, and both times it was aimed at streets rather than at export markets.

The signature sound is the log drum, and its origin is genuinely undocumented. The credit is not in doubt: in September and October 2023 DJ Maphorisa organised payments to the producer Mdu aka TRP, with Maphorisa and Kabza pledging R100,000 each and Major League DJz $50,000. What nobody has published is how it is made. Not the instrument, not the plugin, not the preset. The tutorials are reverse engineering written years afterwards, including Roland's own 2023 piece building one in Zenology from a PCM kick, a sine, a marimba and a pitch-modulated kalimba. That is a manufacturer selling an approximation, not a record of what happened.

One genre that went the other way

Lest this read as one long deceleration: Shangaan electro. Nozinja's productions run up to 190bpm, per Fact in 2013. Same country, same decade as gqom, opposite direction.

Two producers called Mdu

This one matters, because the most-read reference work on the subject has it wrong. Wikipedia's amapiano article says the log drum "was possibly developed from the traditional or acoustic West African log drum by kwaito pioneer M'du (also known as Mdu Masilela)". Mdu Masilela is the kwaito producer, born 25 April 1970 in Zola, Soweto. He is not the person the amapiano industry paid over a million rand to in 2023. That was Mdu aka TRP, a different and much younger producer.

The confusion starts with Kabza, who says only "Mdu": "First it was remixes then Mdu came up. I don't know what happened, I don't know how he figured out the log drum." Two working producers, one first name, thirty years apart. Check which one you mean.

What we could not verify

  • What was in any kwaito label's studio. Kalawa Jazmee, 999 Music, Ghetto Ruff, Mdu Music. No equipment list for any of them.
  • Any bubblegum record's gear, at model level. Not one, for any artist, from any source. The Professor Rhythm list is the single exception, and it covers albums from 1991 and the mid-nineties, not the bubblegum peak.
  • Italian house records reaching Johannesburg. Frequently asserted. We found no source. Oskido names American and London records and "around Europe", then stops.
  • Whether anyone slowed house down inside a sampler or sequencer. Every documented account is a DJ playing a record slower on a deck; the original productions were simply written at the slower tempo. Plausible that someone dropped a sampled loop to get there. No source says so, so neither do we.
  • The turntables. "Minus two to minus eight" is a pitch fader reading. Nobody names the deck.
  • How the log drum is made. Credited to a man, described by nobody.
  • The Roland MC-500's launch year. One restoration site says January 1985. Every British magazine review we found runs from August 1986, Sound On Sound quoting a current price of GBP 799. We would say 1986 and note the disagreement.
  • Kwaito's etymology, both ways. Most sources derive it from township slang "kwaai" meaning cool. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary derives it from the Amakwaito, 1950s Sophiatown gangsters, and glosses the Afrikaans "kwaai" as "angry, vicious". Related, but not the same story, and the second version usually gets left out.

If you are chasing this sound now

Be honest about what the research supports. We have no Korg M1 and no DX7, and those are two of the four machines in the only documented South African rig in this article, so we are not going to sell you a substitute and pretend otherwise. What we do have from that list is the Juno-60, plus its cheaper stablemate the Juno-106. No MC-500 either, but its ancestor is here: the JSQ-60, an early-eighties Roland sequencer with DCB, the socket a Juno-60 speaks. For a step sequencer built this decade, the Polyend Seq. The Korg in stock is a Polysix: analogue, 1981, a completely different animal from an M1, and not the house piano.

Everything that leaves the bench gets serviced first, and we will tell you when a machine is not worth the work. What that costs is set out in the recapping piece. If you are buying from outside the country, read the import guide first, because the duty and VAT will cost you more than the courier will.

The last word belongs to the man who moved the fader. Oskido, to Mixmag: "I always call amapiano the first born of kwaito, and I'm happy with that."

Sources

Tags: Africa Drum Machines Roland South Africa Studio History Synthesizers
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