Complextro

What it is

2011 was the year the stabs learned to take turns. Porter Robinson was nineteen and posting tracks that passed one melodic line between six synth patches, a sixteenth at a time. Wolfgang Gartner had been doing something similar with a funkier accent for two years already, and Madeon turned it into a party trick with a live pad controller. The word came off a forum and stuck. The technique is easy to describe and brutal to execute: write one line, decide which sound plays each note of it, then automate the processing on every one of those notes separately. Drums have to make room for all that, which is why the kick in the second bar of a loop like this stops behaving.

What it sounds like

Busy, bright and full of edges. Bass and lead are a single part split across many voices, so the timbre changes on nearly every sixteenth: a square here, a formant-filtered saw there, a bit-crushed pluck, a talkbox vowel. Drums are dense, with sixteenth hats full of deliberate holes and a clap that moves off the backbeat whenever the stabs need beat four. There is an enormous amount of transient information. Everything is short, gated, and glued back together with a fast bus compressor. Sub is a separate clean sine, because none of the mid voices survive with low end on them. Filters open and close constantly, and the automation is drawn rather than played.

Key elements

• One line, many voicesA single melodic phrase where each sixteenth is a different patch. The interest lives in the joins, so the parts have to be edited to sample accuracy or the trick falls apart.
• Kick removal in bar twoBeats 2 and 4 of the second bar lose their kick, which moves to the a of 1, the and of 2, the a of 3 and the and of 4 instead. The floor stops being underneath you for a bar.
• A displaced clapIn bar two the backbeat comes off beat 4 and lands on the and of 3, so the bar resolves early and the next downbeat arrives as a surprise.
• Sixteenth hats with holesTwenty four closed hits across the two bars on a sixteenth grid, with specific steps removed to let a stab through. The holes are placed rather than random.
• Woodblock punctuationSix dry woodblock hits: the a of 1 and the a of 3 in bar one, then the e of all four beats in bar two. It sounds like percussion and functions as a full stop.

How to get them

• Write the line firstOne monophonic phrase, sixteen or thirty two notes long. Then split it across patches by cutting the MIDI rather than crossfading audio, so the note-offs stay exact.
• Process per noteBounce each voice separately and put a different chain on each clip: bit crusher on one, comb filter on the next, formant shifter on a third. Draw the automation rather than recording it live.
• GlueOne fast bus compressor over everything except the kick and the sub, 4 to 1, 3ms attack, 60ms release, aiming for about 4dB. Without it the handovers sound like six separate records.
• DrumsPunch a hole in the hat pattern wherever a stab lands on a sixteenth. Then take the kick off beats 2 and 4 of the second bar and put it on the syncopations instead.
• SubA clean sine following the root, with every mid voice high-passed at 150Hz. No other voice should carry any energy at all below 100Hz.
• Keep it two barsWrite the whole thing as a two bar phrase and vary it by editing rather than by adding. Once there are eight voices in play, one more part is what tips the mix over.

Reference points

Porter Robinson, Wolfgang Gartner, Madeon, Dirtyphonics, Knife Party's lighter records, and the OWSLA and Ultra catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.