Minimal Techno

What it is

Robert Hood's Minimal Nation in 1994 set the terms, and by the early 2000s Richie Hawtin, Ricardo Villalobos and the Perlon and Kompakt catalogues had turned it into a decade-long project. The idea is that if you take almost everything away, the ear starts hearing the remaining details as enormous. A hi-hat moving three milliseconds late becomes an event. Because there is so little content, the arrangement is done at the level of individual hits and filter positions, and a good minimal record rewards attention in a way a busy one cannot.

What it sounds like

A dry kick, a rimshot instead of a snare, a woodblock or clave ticking a figure that does not line up with the beat, and hats that vary by a few velocity points from bar to bar. The bass is one note. Somewhere in the middle there is a click, a pop or a fragment of a voice looped at an awkward length. Everything is close, dry and small, and the low end is felt rather than heard because there is no other information competing with it.

Key elements

• A clave figure across the gridA son or rumba clave played on a woodblock or clave sample. Five hits, none of them on beats 2 or 4, and it is the only thing in the track that sounds like a melody.
• Micro-dynamicsHat velocities moving between the thirties and the sixties within a bar. Flat velocities in minimal techno produce nothing at all, because there is no other content to hide behind.
• One bass noteA short filtered pluck on the root, repeated. Any actual melodic movement makes it a different genre.
• Rimshot backbeatA dry side stick placed off the beat rather than on 2 and 4, so the ear never gets a comfortable backbeat to sit on.
• Slow filter movesA high-pass creeping up over thirty two bars on the whole drum bus. The change is inaudible at any given moment and obvious over a minute.

How to get them

• KickShort, dry, no reverb, weight at 50Hz and nothing above 2kHz. Around 300ms of decay. It should sound close-miked rather than large.
• HatsOne sample, and every hit at a different velocity. Add a few milliseconds of random timing if your sequencer supports it, and vary the sample start point by a millisecond or two.
• ClaveA woodblock or clave at around 800Hz, panned slightly off centre, with a short slap delay of 90ms on the opposite side. Keep it dry enough that you can hear the attack.
• The loop that does not fitTake a click or a vocal fragment and loop it at seven or nine sixteenths instead of eight. It drifts against the bar and comes back round after several bars, which does the arranging for you.
• ArrangementChange exactly one thing every sixteen bars: add the clave, open the high-pass, drop the hats. If you change two things at once it stops being minimal.
• MixingKeep the whole track under about eight simultaneous elements and give each one its own frequency band. There is nowhere for a masking problem to hide here.

Reference points

Robert Hood, Richie Hawtin as Plastikman, Daniel Bell, Ricardo Villalobos, Mike Dehnert, and the Perlon, M_nus and Kompakt labels. Named to point at the sound rather than as endorsements.