How to Make Techno | Ableton Live Tutorial

hi my name is Lois Beck and I'm here at 3:43 labs in New York City and today I'm gonna be talking to you about the principles of techno techno is a term that is used to describe a very wide variety of music and so that's why we decided to make this video not about how to make technical because that wouldn't really make sense there's so many different styles and genres in the subgenres and sounds and possibilities you can do with it what we're gonna do instead is talk to you about some of the basic principles that actually flow through almost all forms of tech now as far as techno goes in the history of the genre these days people may be associate techno with Adam Baer and drum code and Maceo Plex and such artists and maybe octopus recordings but the truth is is that when it started out and started out in Detroit and the basis of it was using drum machines and it was manipulating drum machines and sequencing synthesizers and working those in real time to create the sound of techno and so to that extent I thought it would make the most sense to kind of mimic that style of production and that approach to the creative process of techno I'm gonna try to make it sound as modern as possible but I'm just going to kind of draw on it in a more classical way in terms of approaching it in a production sense so what I've got here is a basic 909 kick which is the foundation blocks of the origins of techno the 909 is really what started at all when Juan Atkins got his first 909 from I believe it was Frankie Knuckles over in Chicago actually which was Houston next we got little 808 snare right and the cool thing about doing this in the computer is that if I want to do this back in the day I need a 9 or 9 and an 808 which would cost a little bit of money but now I can just yank in these samples so I have this 808 snare a hi-hat from an 808 a low Tom from an 808 and a mid tom from an 808 and so I'm basically gonna show you that you can make techno only using these things in terms of your rhythmic stuff and then we'll look at how you could use some instrumentation as well the first thing I should say about techno and which is probably a widespread misconception is that it does not have to be four on the floor in fact there's a lot of really exceptional techno that is more breaky and uses a little bit experimental rhythmic placements for the kick-drum and so I'm actually partial to that style of techno and for this tutorial I'm gonna kind of show you how to approach it from that way and also going to show you what it feels like to throw a four on the floor kick under it and show you how it's a very different experience we're gonna do is I'm gonna actually start with an 808 groove a group of my 808 Tom's so I supposed to start with the kick drum which a lot of producers do what I like to do is I like to create some sort of core rhythm or core groove that I then can build around and I usually just really improvise it just kind of hear the sounds try to feel out some nice rhythm that I can find so I'm gonna hit record and it kind of approach this with no plan so I'm also going to speed up this project quite a bit 1:24 what I'm trying to do right now is a little slow so I may I'll pull this up to 127 and I'm gonna go ahead and quantize what I just played in for techno you know we're not necessarily looking for free organic feeling rhythms it is very much about having a little bit more of a stilted rigid feel that doesn't mean you can't have organic sounding techno but particularly for this style of what I'm doing than this we're gonna quantization is gonna be very key so well here I played right at this faster pace and it immediately evokes some sort of rhythm right now the key whether it's house music or techno really any form of rhythmic bass music even if you're writing funk is once you have your core groove that should be your master reference in terms of how to then build a rhythm off of that one of the biggest mistakes that newer producers make is they think that each element has to be doing its own thing but really what it should be as each element should be contributing in some some way to a singular groove that then is conveyed as this larger feeling groove and so what we can do is we can use different instruments at different times to emphasize different points of the groove and that's big part of what I'm also gonna be doing so I start out with this Tom groove and I'm actually going to duplicate the track and record what I do next on a new track this hi-hat now obviously again my playing is not that brilliant but with the magic of quantization we should get what I was going for somewhere in there yeah so that last one sounded like what I was going for it so what will what we hear right is that if we look at the the MIDI for the Tom's and then we come back and look at the MIDI for the hi-hats the the points of emphasis are dancing off each other and overlapping right so we have this eighth note that's being hitting the Tom's it's the same eighth note that's being hit in the hi-hat right and so what I'll do with the hi-hat is when she was called syncopation so I'm filling in little offbeat moments to kind of fill out the groove and make it dance even more now again I'm gonna duplicate the track and of course labeling is very important I call this my Tom groove I and then I'm gonna actually do my kick work here so I got a record just kind of feel it out so the way that I at least personally like to approach writing grooves for electronic music whether it be house or techno is I kind of take this approach of your grooves should be four four bars long and it should mostly be the same but you should slightly changed at the end of the second bar in the fourth bar so if we listen we have we have so if doom doom doom doom doom doom don't don't don't do don't don't don't don't don't do it right so one and three are the same but two and four or a slight variation now one contemporary production technique this use very very often in techno is using reverb on your kick drum so I'm actually gonna drag some reverb on there but this is very important I'm not gonna actually have it beat directly on it so I'm gonna create an audio effect track and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna process the reverb in parallel so I'm gonna have my dry signal I'm gonna have my reverb signal and for this technique you always want to have your wet at 100% and I'm gonna have a fairly low decay time I don't I don't want a super long decay time right because if you put reverb on groove elements on rhythmic elements what happens is is your ear is actually going to interpret the note as lasting for the length of time that the reverb lasts so you could take something that's very tight and interesting and make it actually a little bit too like righty or rolling as we would call it if we solo out just the kick drum for a moment and listen to just the reverb the other thing I'm gonna want is to have it be mono straight down the middle and I'm gonna want to cut out the highs so that's what I want this deep kind of industrial sound so when I unn so it right that's without it it's subtle but it really fills it out it makes a little more aggressive now I've listened to in contact without the reverb right what this does is it kind of fills in that space behind between the kick drum and the Tom's looks right in between right behind the mix and maybe I'll even put on a saturator after it just to get a little bit of grit and grain out of it why don't you turn everything down a little bit because I'm clipping that's not fun all right cool so the next thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna now record my snare and as opposed to recording it actually this time there draw it in and so everything here right now is you know kind of doing its own little unique groove it's sort of breaky right there's it's not what we would immediately identify with a classic four-on-the-floor style of thing so what I'm gonna actually do is I'm gonna create an element that juxtaposes that something that very rigidly is saying these are the beats that we're using right so I'm gonna put my snare on every sixteenth know what I'm gonna do is let's first listen what that sounds like which is cool there's no doubt but it's also like a little intense what I'm actually gonna do is I'm gonna adjust the velocity on this so where the hi-hat normally would fall which is a point of emphasis I'm actually going to de-emphasize those moments and what's strange about that is that it'll actually make the the groove revolve around that spot more by virtue of the actual absence of the snare there it actually makes us lean into it more so the one way to do it right is to put a hi-hat there to emphasize it but the other way to actually do it is to kind of create a cavity around that spot now I'm gonna duplicate this loop and again right I'm looking for four bars and even though this is all sixteenth notes there's still a small amount of variation that I can do so right here I'm gonna do a bit of a roll because that's that tends to be kind of cool with this style of music and you know this is a bit of a nod to like Richie Hawtin plastic man so maybe that spot wasn't the right spot for it I'll move these over bring this guy over here now let's listen maybe this is too long of a roll in general just need a short one yeah so now I'm gonna get I'm gonna duplicate this loop and a big part of techno is trying to subvert expectations and so instead of having the roll be in the same spot I'm just gonna actually move it to the start of this earlier bar so what will happen is is and the thing is is a lot of times with techno actually a certain degree of randomness is quite quite nice because we almost want people to to be engaged with this mechanical groove that is also somewhat unpredictable I think that's what humanizes techno more than anything so I'm pretty satisfied with that for the snare this snare so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and add a synth step it's probably making a chord step let's drag on analog from Ableton and with with techno I'd say the most common chord is gonna be a Mista minor chord [Music] now again for techno reverb is just so important so I'm gonna I'm gonna drag reverb onto this channel now I like that groove I don't want to record it so this is where MIDI capture comes in super handy right I just cook like that and then everything that I just played comes in this is probably one of my favorite things about able to again just gonna quantize that and now maybe I'll come in and edit the chord sound itself a little bit I want it to be a little snappier [Music] maybe add a little LFO shoulder now again because of that kind of randomness and chaos that I think is real good techno utilizes I'm not gonna have my rate tied to a note value I want it to be floating I want it to be unpredictable I want to always be slightly off and always eventually be slightly on right it's what propels things forward with techno is the fact that things almost never land where they're quite supposed to show it do one element that's rolling off the rest of the groove a little bit [Music] alright so now that I have most of the groove written what I'm gonna do is is I'm gonna go ahead and drag it to arrangement view and now I'm going to loop it out for 33 bars and I'm gonna show you how you actually would go about arranging a techno song now I'm not going to get into the details of how you start and you know where which tell you my stars and all this but a big part of it actually is trying to emulate the usage of a drum machine to be able to actually physically and manually make changes to some of your sounds so what I'm gonna do is I've actually set up my hi-hat and my snare so that I can manipulate them sort of as if they were in a drum machine it's not gonna be quite the same feeling but you'll kind of get the idea so I'm going to MIDI map the release time on my hi-hat to a knob and I'm also going to minimap the decay time on a reverb for my snare and so what that's going to hopefully do is sort of imitate my ability to make a snares release longer on a drum machine and so messing with these release values is really cool and can be very fun so I'll show you what that alone just sounds like playing with those first I'll start with the hi-hat right so just a little bit of making it push and pull and come in right is a big part of making this work so much good for the saturator on the hi-hat just because if you sometimes overly saturated something you can add a little bit of more like weight to these longer release values so I'll do that with the hi-hat so now from the snare drum I'm going to control this reverb decay time to make it seem like it's sort of getting a little bit longer now again I'm actually gonna put the sats right around after it to exaggerate the effect of that happening so you can hear how it makes it a little bit more alive when I do that so now I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on automation record and I'm actually going to perform my hi-hat part in my snare part so first I'm going to make sure that they sound the way I want them to starting naturally cool so what you're gonna listen for right now is how I'm actually changing this release time on the hat and the snare alternatively so I'm just gonna hit record and then go for it so at the end of that now if we press a right and we just look at what I recorded you can actually see the performance that I did and so we'll listen back to that now and see what it added alright so you can already hear from just listening that part that we get this sense of motion and pushing and pulling and this is a big part of what we want now the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do the exact same thing for my chord steps except this time I'm gonna map my cutoff for the courts now the reason I'm doing all this mapping and doing all this live performance is because the way that I normally go about making techno is I have physical drum machines and physical synthesizers so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this MIDI order take these patterns that I've made right and I'm gonna hit record and I'm just gonna improvise and just feel all these changes that I'm trying to do and that's what's gonna inject that the music with life so real quick so you can just hear [Music] that's what that's what I'm trying to really adjust and then I'll actually also map the release time because that's always fun to play with as well so if you play it back now so that's what I'm right now looking to work with so again I'm just going to go ahead and hit record and kind of just fill this out [Music] [Music] so if we now go back and listen to what this court adjustment right this like little filter play and release play added to the recording we can hear it and you'll notice when I've been doing this right is that it starts off a little more tame and slowly gets crazier and crazier crazyer right you can almost think it like soloing on an instrument where you get deeper and deeper into the feeling [Music] now again adjusting the release time is really beneficial because what happens is as we've discussed earlier is that when you make the release time really long on a note right it makes the actual rhythmic moment lasts a lot longer right so it changes the actual feeling of the groove for the listener so what we really are trying to do with any form of techno is create a groove that is is driving and compelling but then actually mess with the feeling of accentuation and where the moments are being presented and how the whole groove is kind of functioning so a lot of times we're pushing it forward a lot of energy than pulling it back and pushing it and pulling it that's kind of what it's all about thanks so much for watching this tutorial and the basic principles of techno again my name is Lewis Beck and I'm here at 3:43 labs in New York City if you enjoyed the video please click the subscribe link below to see more videos on our channel and if you're interested in taking classes and learning more about the courses that we offer online as well please visit our website [Music]

Channel: 343 Labs

Views: 464,352

Keywords: ableton, ableton live, 343, 343 labs, electronic music school, electronic music, music production, music technology, learn music production, dubspot, music school

Id: Tbvn_cEux3U

Length: 25min 14sec (1514 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 28 2019