Music Theory for Techno

hey everyone this is oscar from underdog and welcome to music theory for techno as you may know by now underdog is an electronic music school so we teach people to make electronic music and for that we teach some music theory the music theory that we teach usually revolves around choosing a root note constructing a scale over that note and then choosing a chord progression within that scale to serve as the sort of invisible glue that structures the harmony of the entire song now inevitably half my class wants to make face melting pounding techno like i hate models or cast or something similar and so they ask me what am i supposed to do with all this music theory does it apply the same way for techno so in this video i'm going to give you three simple rules to apply music theory to your techno check this out [Music] [Applause] [Music] before we go any further like the video subscribe to the channel and consider signing up for one of our classes on underdog about brussels you can also get a coaching with me following the link below okay so rule number one just use normal music theory you'd be surprised at how many banging technologists just use the regular electronic music music theory and that means you choose first a root note which is going to serve as the feeling of home that's going to be the most important note of your whole song then you're going to construct a scale around that to understand which notes are the legal notes and which notes are the illegal notes the choice of scale is important so don't use the major scale if you can avoid it because that's going to lead to happy results instead either opt for the minor scale which looks like this or take it one step further into techno territory and use the phrygian scale instead this is a little bit of a typical techno scale it's similar to the minor scale except the second degree is flattened and that means that when you approach the root note it gives a very kind of an evil feeling check this out so if you've got yourself a root note and you've got yourself a scale over it now figure out if you're going to want to use a chord progression as you may know a chord progression just means you go from one chord for a few bars to another chord for a few bars in techno often only two chords sometimes three chords for instance in cast hell on earth it goes from the first of the major scale to the third of the major scale it goes from a major chord to a minor chord and back again just over and back over and back consider if that's what you want to do for your track that certainly is a valid option alternatively just stick with your root notes and then program synthesizers to move away from that root note and then back home to that root note and think in intervals not so much in chords think about the octave jump think about the perfect fifth think about the minor third the flat second of the phrygian scale find those relationships and use those in your synthesizers don't think too much in terms of chord changes just think about intervals if you use this approach you're not going that far from classical music theory and everything that you've learned elsewhere applies here to now rule number two embrace dissonance a lot of music theory is just techniques on how to achieve consonants consonants meaning when multiple tones play together they sound harmonious they sound good together in a lot of music consonants is something that you're looking for however in techno not necessarily so dissonance can be a good thing and i'll come back to that in a second there's a concept from classical music that might be helpful here which is called ostinato and that's just like italian for insistence and what that really means is that any pattern or sequence or riff or just combination of notes that keeps getting repeated over and over and over again will eventually sound correct to the listener the listener's ear just adapts and it goes along with the story even if it's quite dissonant so instead of programming long melodies consider maybe focusing on shorter riffs that repeat over time and that you modulate the timbre of so you have the same sequence of notes going over and over but instead it's the character of the sound that changes like filters or distortion or something similar to that consider also that consonants might not be something that you even need in a techno track if you look at the architecture of a typical techno track let's look over here you've got your low end here which is dominated by a kick and a rumble which let's be honest is pretty atonal even if you try to like tune your kicks and whatever it's probably just a big atonal mess up here you've got yourself your high hats which are just churning away also equally atonal so the only thing that has a tone is your sequence in the middle your acid synthesizer riff or whatever the heck it is so this riff now as long as it's repeating over and over again it doesn't really have to worry about being harmonious compared to anything else in your track because it's the only thing that your listener is going to pay attention to in terms of pitch so you can pretty much do whatever you like to make such a riff there are three strategies that are used all the time in techno strategy number a is a 303 style acid loop anything programmed with a 303 sound or similar to a 303 sound has these like repetitive step sequenced riffs that stay really stable over time and the audience really loves it it doesn't really matter which notes they play because as long as it repeats over and over again it's gonna sink in alternatively you can take a chromatic approach to sequencing which is really just a way of sounding intelligent because chromaticism just means playing literally any key on the keyboard regardless of scale so how would you do that well use one of the max for live sequencers maybe where you've got this random button and for every step of the sequence it's going to select a random pitch which you just feed into a synthesizer you don't worry about the music theory about it because it's repetitive third method takes this approach even one step further and just uses continuous pitches not even notes on the keyboard but any pitch in between to create a sequence in modular you see this a lot something like the moog d-fam in the moog d-fam what you do is you set individual step sequencers continuously on any pitch possible not even limited to notes of the keyboard just literally any pitch possible that gives really kind of sequences that sound kind of modular and bloopy like like this now techno music theory rule number three is it's about the sound character music theory is all fine and well but you have to pay extra attention not just to the notes but to the timbre the character of the sound and particularly i'm talking about distortion and detuning let me show you an example of this in ableton let's go okay so here we are in ableton and i want to go from a relatively safe sound to really messing it up and turning it into a techno texture and so here's a simple patch in ableton in silent okay very simple synthesizer sounds now there's two things that i want you to pay extra attention to first of all is messing the sound up at the source if possible now one thing is for instance putting in some pitch bend on the start [Music] it's going to give that kind of a that kind of an edge to the start of it and then the most important one is i want you to detune your oscillators check this out okay up here you've got the detune button and what happens when you detune several oscillators against each other is this we go now that's dissonance [Music] so find yourself the sweet spot somewhere in between there and it's gonna sound glorious okay any synthesizer has some kind of function like this so figure out your synthesizer of choice figure out how to make exact copies like stack voices is often something that it's called you can stack several voices on top of each other and then with one button detune those compared to each other then the next big aspect is distortion do not be afraid of distortion slap it on in huge amounts and later on you can tame the sound again by equalizing it etc but at the source try to make it as rowdy and intense as possible like in this case for instance first i put on some reverb with the valhalla room and then i put on decapitator as you are probably familiar in the punish mode okay so check out what that sounds like now [Music] there we go now we've got ourselves a techno toot let's play it up and down the keyboard just to see what that feels like [Music] that's too low there we go this blasted distorted techno lead that's gonna work for so many nice things i think i ended up making this a while ago trying to reverse engineer paula temple's krala um i can put this rack online if people request for it so leave a comment below if you want me to put this stuff online now before we leave ableton as i mentioned before there are some macs for live devices that let you put random sequences in and the m185 is one of them so check this out when you just hit random on this sequence look what happens try it a few times immediately you get something that's like this insistent techno riff um and you can make it shorter so you can make it a polymeter if you don't know what a polymeter is check out my video on polymeters right here it's worth it but here you can set the sequence length to something that's not a multiple of four and it's immediately gonna give interesting results like five for instance and if you're looking to do 303 style sequencing i highly recommend fosicon this is the d16 emulation of the acid 303 synthesizer it has an internal sequencer which can be a bit disturbing sometimes but you can also sequence it straight from ableton and one of the cool features is that you can skip through different presets of different timbres to feel the really wide palette that a 303 has so let me play that for you now just to just to give you a taste [Music] being able to scroll through presets like this is really inspiring and a very nice way to just check what different timbres would match with your track okay so remember what we saw first of all music theory is your friend maybe it is actually applicable just use a minor or phrygian scale and think in intervals the second rule is to embrace dissonance and repetition because you may not even really need harmony and anything that you repeat over and over again is by definition good and then the third rule is pay extra attention to the timbre and character of your sounds focus on distortion and kind of messing a sound up at the source for more techno production tutorials check out one of these videos subscribe to the channel and until next time stay producing take care of one another bye

Channel: Underdog Electronic Music School

Views: 1,012,469

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Id: JcjT7zgs6cs

Length: 11min 56sec (716 seconds)

Published: Mon May 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Snortingquestdust]

Subscribed! Thanks very concise and clear

[u/brugmansia_tea]

Incredibly useful video, thanks!

[u/dekdekwho]

Thanks for this channel! Any chance you’re be doing a classic House sounds tutorial?