Broken Techno

What it is

Techno that keeps the sound design, the tempo and the coldness but abandons the steady kick, borrowing its rhythm from broken beat, UK bass and early Warp. It has surfaced repeatedly rather than existing as a continuous scene: in the mid nineties around Mo Wax and Warp, in the 2000s through Modeselektor and Shed, and again more recently as the club end of the UK bass scene got faster. The snare on 2 and 4 is what holds it upright. Take that away as well and you have IDM, which is a different family and a different set of intentions.

What it sounds like

Kicks scattered across the bar, often two close together and then nothing for a beat and a half. A hard snare on the backbeat with ghost hits leaning around it. Hats in eighths and a shaker doing the sixteenths, which keeps the top end steady while the bottom refuses to be. The bass is often a long drone that ignores the drums completely, and the contrast between a static low end and an unpredictable kick is most of the effect.

Key elements

• A kick that movesThree or four kicks a bar, on the a of 2 or the and of 3, positions that a four to the floor pattern never touches. No two bars use the same placement.
• Snare on 2 and 4Hard, unmoving, and the anchor for everything else. It is the one element that tells the listener where the bar is.
• Ghost snaresHits in the low forties on the e of 3 and the a of 4, quiet enough to be felt more than heard. They imply a groove the kick is not playing.
• Split hats and shakerThe closed hat marks eighths, the shaker carries the sixteenths. Splitting them keeps the top end legible while the kick is misbehaving.
• A bass that ignores itA sustained low note or slow-moving line that pays no attention to the kick placement, so the drums read as rhythm and the bass reads as harmony.

How to get them

• KickShort and punchy rather than long, around 250ms. Off-grid kicks with long tails smear into each other and the pattern stops being legible.
• Writing the patternStart with the snare on 2 and 4, then place kicks only in positions a four to the floor pattern would not use. If your pattern still works with a straight kick under it, you have not gone far enough.
• Ghost notesCopy the main snare, drop the velocity to about 40, shorten it with a transient shaper and pitch it down a semitone. Two or three per bar is plenty.
• ShakerSixteenths, with the e around 32 and the a around 50, so the shaker itself has an internal lilt. This is where the swing lives when the grid is straight.
• BassDuck it by a fixed amount on every kick regardless of where the kick falls, using the kick as the sidechain key rather than a drawn shape. The pumping becomes as irregular as the pattern.
• Keeping it danceableRepeat a two bar loop for at least eight bars before you change it. Broken patterns need repetition to become legible, and constant variation just reads as noise.

Reference points

Shed, Modeselektor, Objekt, Batu, Skee Mask's harder tracks, Pev and Kowton, and the Hessle Audio and Ilian Tape labels. Given as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.