Be careful you guys don't show your age or distaste for EDM music as most of the music on this forum is rock based music and it could be argued that it has not really advanced that much since the 60's or 70's. EDM has advanced from the electronic music pioneers from the past but I do agree it can be lacking sometimes too!
 
I think phase out kick is a concept. They layer a lot of kicks to make one kick and getting the polarity correct for multiple kicks is important. Phase out might mean changing polarity of one or some of the kicks in order to alter the sound drastically.
 
They may be layering extra kicks onto the bootleg music in order to glue it together more. The hard style kick is going to be snappy I would say and shorter while the big room kick might be rounder and a longer sound as well. High frequency distortion may not be good in a kick sound if it is trying to layer with existing music etc..
 
At least my take on this!

Clubbing became really popular in the 80's.With  disco clubbing was more localized but  in the 80's it went mainstream.  As usual we gays were mostly responsible for that.  EDM is the further evolution of the 80's synth pop, and those famous 12 inch records.

My problem with a lot of the EDM scene is that it has become way too compartmentalized and genre-driven. The kids are exceedingly anal about their genre definitions and I've seen loads of really heated arguments and debate on YouTube and music forums about whether such and such an artist is one incredibly specific sub-sub-genre or another, and it comes down to such inanities as whether the bpm of a track qualifies it for sub-sub-genre A or sub-sub-genre B. 
 
So then they have these strict song structure definitions and the terminology that goes along with it, and from the questions I see them ask on EDM production forums I gather they're very particular about what part goes where, and how you program this section, and how you program that section. It really is a bit like painting by numbers in some respects. Everything is punched in and automated and snapped together like lego and the question is asked: "is this right?" instead of "does this sound good?" 
 
I wouldn't mind any of this if the result was great music (and believe me, I LOVE a bit of great electronic music), but sometimes I will sift through hundreds of new releases on Spotify and sites like Beatport and I really can't tell one producer from another. Same structures, same synth sounds, same drums, same everything. 
 
The temptation is to think "you old fart, you just don't like anything new" but that's really not the case - when I hear a young producer who stands out, whose music has soul and character, I go nuts for it. The trouble is that I've only managed to find a handful of these over the last few years. The rest of it is just generic tosh. Sometimes I will add some of it to a playlist to see if it manages to take root in my head, thinking that maybe once I've given it a few listens I'll hear some qualities in it that I didn't catch first time around, but no, it doesn't happen 
 
I think a lot of it has to do with the modern DAW and how kids are making music these days. Back in the day there was far more emphasis on live performance of parts, getting ideas down to audio as quickly as possible, capturing a moment. Nowadays that emphasis seems to have shifted toward programming the perfect parts and tweaking them ad infinitum until they're "correct." You lose a lot of the musical spontaneity like this.  But like I said, there are some young producers who really stand out and what I hear in their music is that spontaneity, the creative spark, the musical soul. It's not just older farts like me, I've heard younger people ask things like "why does 90's house music seem more "alive" than today's house music?

Well you're correct about the verisimilitude with live music.  I was always taught to never write anything that can't be recreated by an instrument (e.g. in jazz phrasing or the ranges of various symphonic instruments).  Now there's no limits.  I read an article about the band MUSE and they said that they intentionally made their latest record playable.  They realized too late, that they couldn't recreate, live what they had recorded on some previous albums.  DOH!

Live, unquantized parts always stand out in electronic music and I think it sounds very refreshing. Stephan Bodzin is great for that, as is Floating Points. I love Stephan Bodzin's Boiler Room set on YouTube. 

A lot of modern EDM music is actually pretty boring compared to what some of the greats or pioneers were doing. People like Jean Michelle Jarre and Edgar Froese were doing in the 70's and 80's. I tell you what is really refreshing though and I am just loving it is these new CD's that Jarre has done. There is one already out called Electronica and the next one is coming out on May 6th.
 
These tracks are fantastic. What has happened here is the class and great writing and ideas of Jarre collaborating with some really great modern electronic music people and the music is just great. Both parties have shown immense respect for each other and it is evident in the tracks. Please check it out. It is music like this that is just amazing. The modern guys have pulled Jarre into the now but Jarre has kept the music much better and more serious and it has nice form back to classical roots almost. Great intros, arrangements, middles and endings. The things we used to have before.
 
A lot of EDM just pounds away over one chord and really it is not enough. Well not enough for me anyway. I have been spoilt I guess. I also have a strong Jazz background too where harmony and melody reign supreme. I still feel there is room for a few things to merge and fuse. My ultimate style would be a combination of electronic music, Jazz and world rhythms. That’s what really does it for me. And the electronic stuff not quantised either.
 
I tell you when Tangerine Dream played in Melbourne at the end of 2014 they did two gigs and I was fortunate to see both of them. One was big in a big hall and it sounded spectacular but the second was in a small theatre and they re did the soundtrack live to 'The Sorcerer'. They were playing live a lot of the time and it just sounded amazing. They had a fourth female member too playing violin and she was awesome too.

Jeff I have a background (both playing and listening) in jazz and more harmonically complex music too, but I really don't mind the concept of "pounding away over one chord" provided it's done well (Zappa "pounded" over one chord plenty). There's a lot you can do over one chord, and I think people forget that a lot of electronic music is produced for a "trance" mindset whether that be dancing or even meditating! I did the whole rave thing in my early 20's back in the early 90's and sure there was the whole drug thing, but sometimes the magic of being in that warehouse with the trance tunes blasting was in locking into a groove with a crowd of people. The good stuff always had some kind of interesting element to it, whether it was the human performance of synth manipulation (filter cutoffs etc) or poly-rhythms which bent your brain (like 7/16 patterns repeating over a 4/4 beat etc). A good track would also have some kind of finely crafted tension and release element which got the crowd going, and also a trippy atmosphere to it which appealed to the psychedelic crowd (there was a lot of acid going around at the time). Back then I was listening to a lot of jazz, a lot of Zappa, orchestral music, prog rock and the like, but I could still appreciate a well done piece of acid trance or house music. I still can. 
 
I think there are a lot of reasons why the scene has become bland - one of them being the way in which tracks are made now, with all of the endless tweaking and programming of MIDI and soft synths, whereas in the early days it was still very much a hardware thing and consequently there was a lot more planning of tracks, a lot more of a human performance element in getting those tracks down quickly and using whatever limited hardware effects you had on one track at a time instead of having a huge DAW project with 50 instances of the same delays and EQ's. A lot of the EDM I hear now is very well EQ'd with incredible clarity, it just seems to pop out of the speakers at you, but there is something missing and musically it sounds very flat. Maybe the whole scene is just too stale now - back in the late 80's/ early 90's it was fresh and there was a huge sense of excitement and a sense that it was a new era in music. 
 
It could be an influence thing as well. Back in the early days of EDM (before the term EDM was even used), the kids making it (who are now in their 40's and 50's) had more of an analog musical influence. Kids back then had grown up with all sorts of "organic" music like Tangerine Dream, Pink Floyd and even rock acts like Zeppelin. A lot of that influence came out in their tracks. Now you have kids who have grown up only listening to electronic music so the influence has been diluted somewhat. They have more of an expectation of everything being tightly quantized and pitch perfect. And I'm just speculating here but look at their image as well - the kids these days are very neat and tidy, very well groomed, not a hair out of place. They're going to EDM events where everyone has immaculate side partings. LOL! Back in our day there was the crusties, the dreadlocked hippies, the psychedelic crowd and (like me) the ones who showed up to events in an old t-shirt and jeans (because we knew we were going to get dirty in those warehouses so why dress up?). And of course there wasn't this self-conscious awareness that everyone around us was snapping photos to go on social media. It's made everyone so annoyingly vain and I think that comes out in the music too. 

*A good track would also have some kind of finely crafted tension and release element which got the crowd going, and also a trippy atmosphere to it which appealed to the psychedelic crowd *  --
 
Never underestimate the power of the cow bell!

"Cow bell" should be in quotes where EDM is concerned!

Regarding generational taste differences...it's something that's been routinely regurgitated as an excuse for whatever youthful silliness every generation has embraced. But I have rarely experienced it myself.
 
1. My grandkids love classic rock and are surprisingly knowledgeable about it
 
2. My father turned me on to the Beatles
 
3. Every competent musician I've ever known has enjoyed music from every era going back to Medieval times
 
4. I have always actively sought the wisdom of my elders, regardless of the subject. My grandfather taught me my first chords on a guitar. My great-grandfather tried to teach me to play harmonica, but it didn't take. I have relied on older mentors to learn everything from electronics to roofing.
 
5. Physics never changes. Electricity and sound work the same way they always have. Young people may not feel the need to understand them, but that has no bearing on reality. How you feel about something has no bearing on reality. No matter how stressed you feel when flying, it has no bearing on whether or not the plane stays in the air. And if you're guitar's out of tune it doesn't matter that in your mind it isn't.
 
What we're really suffering from is a general devaluation of expertise. How often do you see the word "expert" in quotes, as if it describes some mythical concept that doesn't really exist? As in "the 'experts' said he'd never walk again, but now he's running marathons". Well, that's a great story, but to extrapolate that to a general lesson requires ignoring the 99.99% of the time when "those so-called experts" were right.
 
Expertise takes time to acquire. Yes, that 10,000-hour rule has been somewhat debunked, but it's still true in principle. If a teenager is a great musician, it's because he's extraordinarily dedicated to its study. The vast majority will not - and could not - have put in the necessary hours to attain expertise. But their precious self-esteem demands that we lower the standards of accomplishment until punching colored buttons while waving your hands in the air is considered a musical performance.