5 steps to make pulsating techno like Paula Temple or Surgeon

hi everyone this is oscar from underdog today i want to do a small exercise in organic techno at underdog we do a lot of dance music often that can mean that we are doing something that has a kick drum every one two three four one two three four right and um that is fine and that is great but i think there are some artists out there who really do a wonderful job at breaking that that standard assumption and that succeed at creating these beautiful pulsating impressive powerful pieces of music using all the genre ideas of techno but without limiting themselves to that four to the floor beat pattern one particular one that i want to look at today is paula temple and we're going to make something like this beat from death vox okay you see that holy that is super organic and powerful in a way that i find very inspiring so i spent some time experimenting with how to get to a sound like this and i want to share with you in let's say five levels how to get to something pretty close the final product that we're working towards is something like this so that's kind of going into that organic techno vibe let's explore what the different concepts are that make up such a beat before we go any further like the video subscribe to the channel and click the little bell icon because we need the channel to grow up we're on the way to 1000 subscribers let's do this now back to the track if we remember paulo temple's track there is a lot going on but in a situation like this it's important to zoom in and zoom out to understand the simplest possible way that this beat could be described and then go into all the little complexities and nuances that are inside there and fundamentally at its core what it does is boom boom click boom boom click boom boom click boom boom check this out one two click one two click one two click one two click and everything else is sort of secondary texture around that so if you're dancing that's the tempo that's the pattern that you're dancing to so let's start with that as the base layer of what we're trying to do so step number one is the essential pattern to create the essential pattern all i did was make a drum rack choose myself some samples so this sample for the kick and then a combination of this and this for the little snare rimshot kind of sound so we'll go i layer these two together simply because this one has a good crunchy body to it and this one has that little bit of freshness that we're going to need to offset against the distortion of everything else and so very simply in midi i program the following pattern one two clack one two clack let's listen to that [Music] okay just the same all over again the whole time there's no changes and it's at 130 beats per minute now of course this sounds nothing like the final product right of course we need to add in all these layers of texture that come later on so let's immediately jump into level two and that's the delayed groove that we're gonna add in so to complement this basic pattern what we're gonna do is we're gonna keep the basic pattern and add in sort of echoes delays as called and those delays later on we're going to distort them now we use a technique here called parallel processing which means that if you consider that audio travels through pipes like water let's say and at one point the water splits into two separate pipes and then later comes back together that's parallel processing and once the audio is split up into different branches let's say it can go through different types of effects and then when they get added back together again then that all creates one big hole let me show you how that would work so here's the exact same drum rack right but this time we've added on the kick an effect rack called the delay groove which is something that i just created myself and what happens when it when the audio of this kick drum hits this effect track well it gets split up into two versions of itself one goes through something called the dry chain and the other one goes through something called the groove chain the dry chain will sound exactly like we are already used to [Music] but the groove chain if we solo just the groove chain it sounds like this these are a bunch of echoes these are a bunch of echoes of the original that when we mix them together it sounds like this now you notice that we didn't put anything on the snare sound because we just want that to come through clean and also a clean version of the kick sound is still reaching our ears we're just adding in in parallel this delay effect if we look up closer what's actually inside this delay effect we'll see a couple of things first there's ableton's standard delay at 3 16 100 wet because we don't want the dry signal to be coming through this we put an amp simulator then an equalizer just to tame some of the frequencies where it doesn't need to be and a compressor which is actually a sidechain compressor that's taking the signal from the start of the signal chain it's taking the signal pre-effects on the kick drum that means that the compressor will listen to the original sound of the kick drum before it hits any of the effects and that way every time that the dry kick comes through this delay group goes down a little bit so we get this kind of like swirling mass of echoes but that complements the original beat and doesn't compete with it now you'll notice that this swirling delay group two things about it the first is it's still quite dark and not quite as rich as the apollo temple track the second thing is that the delays actually take a few seconds to reach their full intensity so when we hit play it actually starts with a more boring beat and then becomes more groovy and interesting later we'll deal with both of those issues now so when a sound is not bright enough there are basically two strategies that you can do one is use equalization somehow boosting the upper frequencies in terms of volume but here the real strategy will be to use distortion so all these sort of dark echoes of the kick we're going to distort them so that they start crackling up in the high frequencies quite a bit and that's going to make the sound feel massive basically any sound if you want it to feel large you want it to fill the frequency spectrum from bottom to top also from left to right and also from near to far you want it to sort of feel up close but also far away and we're doing that by letting the dry signal through so a dry kick is up close but then all these delays are further away so we're really filling the entire box let's say with different sounds all originating from this one sound and this thanks to the magic of parallel processing so again i've copied this track over and as you can see this is again just the same drum rack however there's this delay groove but now there's a new effect track called distortion [Music] so you see how far we're coming so we were already here [Music] then this is the second level and that's due to just a couple of layers of distortion also using parallel processing so again you can see that there is one of the chains called clean then another chain called distortion and then i've also created another chain called rolling mids which amplifies really the mid-range let me show you each chain individually for those of you who just want to take a closer look so the clean chain is empty that just means that the audio passes through unaffected the distortion layer first it hits an amp simulator that kind of beefs up the sound so here we're using a three band splits that's basically just an effect track the same as before with three different chains so the audio gets split into three identical copies of itself and the idea is that each chain will focus on a different part of this frequency spectrum so the low end will leave it mostly the way it is we want that thick heavy low end to sort of stay where it is however the mid and the high frequencies we're both going to run those through some amp simulators and then use only the mid and high frequencies of those distorted versions now let's just solo each band individually so you can listen to what the different types of crunch sound like so the low end pretty undistorted the mids [Applause] kind of sound like an old telephone with just the high and the low end frequencies removed and it's going through a delay it's going through an amp we are then soloing only the middle frequencies and then we're putting it through a hass effect widener the hass effect widener just takes two identical copies of a mono sound and puts a delay on one of them slightly just for a few milliseconds which tells your ears that it's coming from the sides this is a great way of widening a sound to place it very much on the sides of the stereo spectrum and the high end so that crunchy bitey top end this is something that you'll encounter a lot in trying to produce techno is it you might be attracted to making darker sounds because they sound big and when you put them up loud they're very impressive and yet at the same time a well-designed techno track also has quite a crisp top end because your ears they identify that as a kind of a freshness and it also makes your tracks translate quite well on smaller speakers so something to be aware of darker sounds does not always mean only using low frequencies darker sounds also have high frequencies like this so together they sound like this and unsoloed now there's another layer here called rolling mids let's have a look what's in there [Music] this is another layer of mids because clearly the other distortion layer i had pushed those mids very much to the side and so there's kind of a hole in the mid-range that needs to be filled so this separate layer kind of does that and make sure that there's a really tough punchy mid-range to the sound the actual effects on here are a delay an amplifier an equalizer which makes sure that we've only got the mid-range and then a saturator that saturates a little bit just those frequencies this helps sort of grounds the loop in the mid frequencies let me show you it without and let me show it with so let me turn it off first [Music] and now with much much more robust in the in the midst now we've come quite far but let's compare with paulo temple's track again let me go from one to the other there's still a few things missing and paula's track is even wider so we have to figure out how to add even a little bit more width to this track and what i decided to do was make another copy and on the distortion rack create something called the side groove let me show you what that sounds like even more sides there so as you can see we're getting pretty wild here with how much processing we're just putting on one simple pattern because remember we came from this right [Music] so you can be forgiven for getting a little bit lost in how all the signal flow is going but just remember there's the dry sound then there's a delay that gives like the groove and then there's a bunch of distortion on that delay and those are the three steps really then at the end we're putting a little bit more processing like some saturation and stuff just to glue the whole thing together but conceptually it's only really those three steps let's have a look at some of the end processing here as well we've got ourselves a drum bus and then i got myself two eqs there's no particular reason you need to do two eqs this is just how i sort of did iteratively a few different versions as i was sound designing it because you don't sound designed something like this from scratch you kind of go forwards and backwards and you squint it's kind of like a like an audio sculpture in a way you know you make some changes then you back away and then you come and make some more changes and you back away and try to zoom out try to zoom in listen to some reference tracks try to get it to where it needs to be and so if i've done some equalizing at one moment of the sound design process sometimes it's easier to just add some more equalization afterwards there's some people who might argue against that but i honestly think it's fine as long as it doesn't become like three or four or five different eq's because then maybe you're not really considering all the different changes that you're making but anyway i would say that one of the main secrets here at the end is this drum bus for making everything sound as one coherent hole what's happening in the drum bus while there's some distortion here the medium drive and then there's this crunch which has really cranked up to 60 percent that like if i play it to you without the drum bus let me show you it sounds quite friendly sounds quite friendly and not at all the character that we're looking for so if i turn on this drum bus this crunch [Music] it's really filling everything out and making everything sound yeah very crunchy it's exactly what it says so let's say we're pretty close to where we want to be now there is a problem that whenever this beat starts the delays don't start immediately as well so to solve that what i would do at this point is commit to audio on this and i would say let me freeze it to audio so i've got an exact copy of it here and i'm just going to hit right click freeze track and then flatten and once it's flattened you can see here you can see that there's this dry kick kick kick kick kick but then later on it starts to get more chaotic as the as the groove starts to multiply so what we'll do is we'll take the second half of this and just copy it over boom so that from the very beginning we immediately start with the full groove and now there's a limit to how powerful this can sound in itself without a few other factors around it so what i like to do is i like to create something called air which is just any kind of room tone static noise anything that's kind of consistent and not changing but it just gives a kind of an ambiance let me let me show you this is something called a room tone from a gold baby sound pack and what it's got on it is a side chain compressor side chain to the kick another drum bus just to abuse that crunch function and then an eq8 to make sure that it's only adding frequencies above 1k the way this pulsates along with the groove it kind of fills up the frequency spectrum let's let's show you and one powerful thing that paulo temple does here in her track is at the very end she cuts for a few moments she cuts the beat for a few moments now if we were working with this massive parallel processing situation it's really hard to make these kind of automations because there's so many factors that the workflow is just not very smooth it's way easier now that we've bounced it to audio because we can literally just drag this back figure out where we want it to end and then if we wanted to have this kind of like delay tail like she has here we can just add that in like as a layer that we've resampled by resampling some claps or some snares so there we go we're almost there now so we've got our frozen audio we've got our air and then we would just add ourselves some sound designed elements which create the actual world of the track i mean once you've created this this beat you've only created only one voice of the actual song that you're going to create it's this beat plus a number of other elements and of course that's up to you as an artist to figure out how you're going to do it what i've done to just be able to look at this sound in perspective with another musical element is i've gone into silent which is like a vst synthesizer and it has an internal arpeggiator which when i just go through some presets there's some of them who create like a whole song when you just when you just hold down one key and after browsing a few i just found these little bells [Music] this reminds me of a kind of like a 90s horror techno kind of track and then i did a little silly thing with uh recording my voice and pitching it down kind of like in death fox just because i wanted to see how that would go so that that sounds a little bit like this and so let's just layer those in with the beads and see where we get there you go i don't pretend that this is in any way like a finished song or anything um but it's just to show the beat in context against some other elements if you want to learn how to do more things like this do consider signing up for one of our boot camps or one of our deep dive programs on www.underdog.brussels we are actually an online school where we run small classrooms helping people to break down their favorite tracks and recreate something in that style i hope you learned something from what we did here today do check out some of the other videos that you'll find on this channel and leave a comment below letting me know if you want me to do any other track breakdowns from other artists my name is oscar this is underdog electronic music school stay producing be nice to each other and take care bye bye

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 132,252

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Id: ijusv06q0sU

Length: 18min 58sec (1138 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 06 2021

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