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Posted by Lira on Sep-19-2002 15:22:

Trouble producing techno

All right, I know this is a forum about trance music, but I wonder if some of you "flirt" with techno too.

I usually produce uplifting trance, but lately, I've been getting addicted to techno (Ken Ishii, Fumiya Tanaka, Chris Liberator,...) and everytime I try to produce some techno using fruity loops or hammerhead, it sounds like total crap (I wonder why ).

What softwares do you guys recommend for techno?

(I searched for old threads, but I didn't find anything talking about it )

Posted by Pjotr G on Sep-19-2002 15:48:

fruity's ok...it's not like if you change software suddenly you CAN make bangin techno....Try to analyse existing techno songs to find out what's missing

Posted by Tom_cowan on Sep-19-2002 15:54:

Drums! Lots and lots of Drums! I use reason so i odnt know how youd do it in floops but i find if you load the drum samples onto samplers and go wild with effects, including fucking around with the parameters on the sampler like frequency and change the parameters dynamicaly by using lfos u can make some dirty techno beats. Try droping the pitch of the kick drums, u want the bottom end to be thick and full. The aim is to make the beats complicated enuf so you cant distinguish what sound comes from where if you get what i mean. Keep it Dirty!

Posted by hey cheggy on Sep-19-2002 16:04:

Dirty techno rocks. Your best bet is to get a really good sample library of percussion as well as kick drums. The percussion, and percussion i mean non bass drum although they are percussion also, is what forms the structure of techno. Lots of snares, symbols, clanky sounds galore. Also, sample vocals and synths and stuff and chop them up big time. Get samples of vocals and cut them up short so they don't even make sense anymore, it just forms a sound.

Finally, make sure that everything is panned so it doesn't get all cluttered, and pan them to different amounts. Also, make sure the sounds aren't distorted. I can't stand distorted percussive music, it sounds like crap.

Posted by Lira on Sep-19-2002 17:01:

Don't want to be annoying but:

where can I get reason? Whenever I search for it, I find everything except what I'm looking for I've heard about cubase too, is it good? Where can I get it?

And these drum sample kits, are you talking about those CD's we buy or the ones available on the net? Everything I find on the net is so... simple

Sorry for all these questions, but it's been a long time since I last updated my softwares, I'm tottaly lost

Posted by hey cheggy on Sep-19-2002 17:33:

I'm sure you can reason 2 from propellerheads software

As far as sample libraries go, you need to get them on cd, free stuff isn't usually as good, although there are some great ones out there if you know where to look, but getting a sample library on cd will give you heaps to play around with. Reason actually comes with a sample library to use in Redrum, which is the drum machine in it. Also comes with patches for the synth and stuff like that.

Cubase is a sequencer. you use it to arrange your sounds into music. Reason comes with a sequencer, but it's pretty average, you're best off getting something like cubase vst 5.1 or Cubase SX, although i remember reading SX is only really designed for Windows XP or something.

Start off wiht reason, and if you feel like you need more sounds (it comes with a lot), then you can buy sample cd's. I think you can also get extra sample cd's that go with reason

Posted by Lira on Sep-20-2002 03:18:

Cheers Cheggy, I owe you one!
I'm downloading Reason 2 already

Posted by Theotrope on Sep-20-2002 05:18:

what you need are some VST plugins.

>a dirty as fuck bass that you can use for all your squelching hard acid sounds is Muon Tau Bassline 3 types (-12/-24/-36dB per octave) of lowpass filter, onboard chorus/phase/flange/distortion, a really really disgustingly harsh resonance, dual osc, ringmod, about 16 differing saw/tri/sqr/sin waveforms.. i forget how many exactly.

>a plugin to thrash your sound to hell and back: WARP vst
its a distortion/ speaker simulation
with 3 types of distortion (Clear/Plastic/Warp), and 3 types of Speaker sim: the names of which i forget
3 band EQ for each as well

of course you'll need to compress all your sounds very heavily when making techno.. you can do that with whichever compressor you feel like using.. sometimes i still use good old Hyperprism compressor and Noise Gate

oh yeah... LOTS AND LOTS OF 909 RIDE CYMBALS.