Dub Techno
A chord, a delay, and forty minutes of the two of them talking.
The pattern
2 bars, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
Twenty one hits across two bars, and none of them above velocity 104. The rimshot sits on the and of 2 and the and of 4, which is where the chord stab goes, so the two of them land together and the delay carries them away. The closed hats mark the offbeat eighths at around 50 to 58, quiet enough to read as air rather than as a rhythm part. There is exactly one open hat in the whole loop, on the and of 4 of bar two, and the closed hat steps aside for it. Bar two also adds a ghost rimshot on the a of 3.
What it is
Berlin in the early nineties, and specifically Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus recording as Basic Channel and later Rhythm & Sound. They took the reverb and delay practice of Jamaican dub, applied it to a techno chord stab, and ran the results through a mastering chain until the noise floor became part of the instrument. The music barely changes over eight or ten minutes. What changes is the feedback, the filter and the amount of hiss, and if you listen properly the arrangement is unmistakable even though nothing new ever enters.
What it sounds like
A soft kick with more thump than click, and a chord stab on the offbeat that has been through a tape delay so many times it has lost its edges. Hats are quiet, sometimes only a filtered hiss. A rimshot ticks in the middle distance. Everything is wrapped in a reverb that never quite ends and a hum you would remove from any other record. It is quiet music played loud, and the dynamic range of the whole track is about six decibels.
Key elements
- The chord stabA minor seventh played on the offbeat, short, then handed straight to a delay. It is the only harmonic event in the record and it repeats for the entire duration.
- Feedback as arrangementA tape or bucket-brigade delay with the feedback near self-oscillation, pushed and pulled by hand. The build and the drop are both done on that one knob.
- Noise floorTape hiss, vinyl crackle, a mains hum. Left in on purpose, mixed as a layer, and filtered along with everything else.
- Rimshot instead of a clapA dry side stick where a backbeat would go, quiet enough that it reads as a tick rather than a hit. A clap would be far too much event.
- Almost no hi-hatsTwo or three closed hats a bar at low velocity, and one open hat every couple of bars. The top end belongs to the reverb tail.
How to get them
- ChordTwo detuned saws through a low-pass at around 1.2kHz, a decay of about 150ms, no sustain. Play it once, resample it, and use the sample from then on so the timbre never drifts.
- DelayA dotted eighth or a three-sixteenth delay with feedback around 70 percent, tape emulation on, and a high-pass at 250Hz in the feedback path so repeats get darker each pass.
- ReverbA long hall of six to eight seconds on a send, low-passed at 4kHz. Automate the send rather than the reverb, and never let the dry chord be the loudest version of itself.
- KickRound it off: a 909 kick with the attack transient shaved by a couple of decibels and the body around 50Hz. Nothing here should have a sharp edge.
- NoiseA loop of vinyl surface noise or tape hiss under everything at about minus thirty. Route it through the same filter as the chord so they move together.
- PatienceSet a loop and record a ten minute pass moving one control at a time. Cut it down afterwards. Writing this in the arrangement window rarely works.
Reference points
Basic Channel, Maurizio, Rhythm & Sound, Deepchord, Echospace, Vladislav Delay, Fluxion, and the Chain Reaction label. Listed as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.