techno-music-making

Techno music making has been until now has been very expensive. I have a secret though. I am going to confess it here:

I do not know how to play the piano, I do not know how to use music theory, and finally I do not have a studio.

You may feel that Techno music making is as far away as it could be for me then? Well no.

I have been Techno music making for well over 20 years now and I have produced many a tune for which I am happy about. Some of these tunes have gone onto feature in a small YouTube comedy short:

Those 2 tunes cost me nothing to make, cost me nothing to produce and took me half a day (in total) to complete from scratch. Now I know what some people say "it must have cost you something?". Ermm...well it didn't. I found all the sounds for both tunes for free...no piracy and no trial ware.

I even found the software to make the actual tunes for free. So why am I telling you this?

Well I am tired of the same old YouTube footage of Reason, FL Studio, Ableton etc being promoted as the best ever music making package around. Or someone buying a package that their fave artist uses.

Let me tell you something that is not usually told: These packages are cool, there is no doubt about it (to try them out I bought them) and do you know what I found? The various packages are good for what they were built for. Ableton, for example is great for mashups, DJing and mixing. It wipes the floor with everything that I know of for that job.

Reason is great for weird sounding stuff. It is complicated and also Reason tracks sound the same (hence why pro artists have suped up their packages with Refills- which cost that bit more). What I enjoy Reason for is its drums and its drum machine. I have to alter and add effects to them or else they will sound the same, but its drums and how to build them are super cool.

But my Techno music making is not usually through those packages. This is similar to most pro artists. They may have 4 different packages but they will only know one package really well. They will use the other packages plus points but they will always come back to the package they know best.

I on the other hand will constantly use a package that has:

1) The same effects as
2) An easy use interface
3) Is a free system
4) I can use whatever sounds I like
5) I can Rewire it to some of the packages I have got (Rewire is a cool free app that is installed on music software that allows them to talk to one another. This then technically allows free packages to talk to expensive ones. Which I don't think was the initial idea :)

I use a Tracker to make my techno. Some people have heard of them most haven't. If you think of a tracker with these type of points in mind:

1. A tracker uses a vertical scrolling screen (in Reason the music screen goes from right to left)

2. A tracker is upto 100% cheaper than its published counterparts (i.e free)

3. They can use softsynths- VSTs (software that emulate synths, drum machines and effects)

4. They are regularly updated by dedicated programmmers who scan the expensive programs and insert different versions of their code.

5. They can use a step by step sequencer system that allows you to place notes or sounds into its sequencer one at a time, so if you fluff a note, you delete it and then insert the proper one without having to play the whole line again.

6. Computer Music Magazine stated in their '06 issue that producers are now trying out trackers because they are more creative and don't follow the a set of rules- allowing the music maker to be more creative.

The video shows a very quick piece that I made. I loaded up a synth VST, a bass VST and a basic drum kit. What you see within the video is realtime. What you see is my scrap pad. This allows me to figure out what works what doesn't and I basically create a tune within the confines of a 30 second bit of sequencer. It is wise to do this because if you travel into the song a find a start synth doesn't go well with a main synth lead you have to either 1. reinvent another synth line or 2. scrap the whole lot.

The scrap pad allows ideas to flow and to be designed. I can also tell what is too loud, what should be used with what and also it lets me pad out new ideas. Just letting a beat run and run with a basic bass line allows you to be more spontaneous in adding another sound within the mix.

Using a "scrap book method" allows you to do one thing that is really fundamental, and this comes down to your fave drumloop or bassline.

You will never find an artists drumloop or bassline online...never. It is because the artist has build more percussion and beats upon a basic loop. So a single drum loop that plays throughout a techno track is always built up from many different sounds. This is because of one basic thing. Sounds can not be everything.

The kick is the best example. To get a real thudder of a kick you need a kick that has some sub bass in it and other kicks that cover slightly higher in the lower frequency range. This then allows you to EQ the kick much better as the EQ can only act upon frequencies that are there. Most pro producers forget this and EQ everything in sight. This then maxes out the whole frequency ranges and makes the music sound too jumbled and too unprofessional.

Side note EQ basically allows you to highlight certain frequencies to allow certain sounds to be more prominant than others so that they are not all fighting for the same frequency range and messing up your tracks.

1. If you are looking for a bassline or a good lead that is original try an arpeggio VST for some cool synths. One good one is REZ: http://www.ugoaudio.com/

2. Inspiration will never come to you easily. I love VSTs so I mess around with them and sometimes something just clicks and you can make something straight away. If you are a piano player, dabble on the piano, if you are a drummer, drum. If you are out of your comfort zone your inspiration will be very low = no music.

3. Still stuck? Rip a loop that you really like, copy it. Then mangle it, use different instruments, then tweak the notes a bit, lengthen it out. Eventually you will have a sound and a loop much better and to your tastes than the original.

4. How do people make some great sounds and others just use presets? It is because the best use the presets and then mangle them, mix them and mess them up so they don't sound like the original- but still has its bassline. It would take commercial artists ages to read the manuals fully of every single VST that they have. They don't. they learn one very well, and get fantastic sounds from that all the time.

5. If a sound is sounding harsh try adding a little phaser to the mix. This will reduce the harshness, but will not let it sound dull.

Well, glad that you asked ;) I have created another tune that was made with 3 free VSTs. Here is the tune first: > Stop20. It opens in a new window.

I created it with the following free VSTs: SuperWave P8, Drumatic and Intro. And some drum loops which I created myself, which can be downloaded for free from here: 6 drum loops.

Unzip the loops into Audacity which is a free audio editor. Load in the MP3 loops, and then "export as wav". Simple.

The cool thing about VSTs and all these softsynths is that you can use them more than once. So, if I like a certain bassline which comes with say Intro and then I like a synth line in Intro I just have to load up Intro again. With bigger more powerful VSTs comes the problem of computer slowdown. So I use the free ones all the time because of their reduced processor draining, and also you can usually find whatever sound you want for free.

As a side note. There are even cool piano sounds that you can get for free. The best one so far is MrRay:



The sounds themselves range from great little electric piano sounds, tweaked piano sounds, all the way to guitar plinks and pad sounds. Absolutely a must download: Mr Ray.

Anyway, I use for the sequencer Madtracker which can be downloaded for free here: Madtracker.

It looks like this when you load it up:

Because I know what synths I was going to use (because I have played around with them when they came out, ideas start bouncing around in your head when you hear some really cool sound, so I knew what to use). Also on my computer I have loads of 10 second songs just lying around just as experiments into what works and what doesn't.

So I Add A Synth Riff.

This is made up from the free softsynth and is added to our music software.

The softsynths- VSTs can be accessed by pressing on the green/red icon:




By pressing the green/red button we go into the VST area, this is where our VSTs will be housed. We can then load up our favourite softsynth INTRO by clicking on the yellow folder to the right of the green/red button. I am using Much Lead



As a brief outline:

1. Once Intro or any VST has been loaded in you will see it appear on the screen. Double click on the softsynth text and you will see what it looks like.

2. At the top of Intro, you will see something called Begin, this is a preset sound. To the right of it you will see left and right arrows click the right one to change the preset.

3. By pressing the keys on your computer keyboard you will hear sounds. The keys Z to M are one octave. So C to B on a piano. Q to P on the keyboard are the next octave up. By pressing on the F keys you will find the notes go higher or lower. These are the octaves and the common/ default is F4. F8 is higher octave, F1 is the lowest.

4. Trackers are based on patterns. Press play (arrow at the top left of the screen) and the screen will scroll down and then loop. That is one pattern. A pattern is made up of 64 lines 00 to 63.

Much Lead then gets inserted into MT2 by pressing space bar to record each note that you play on the keyboard. Try it, tap away on the keyboard and you produce sounds, that's because the keypad is now your keyboard! By pressing space bar we can insert a note step wise. If we don't like it then we just press delete.

Remember you need to press space bar to stop recording or else notes to play around with on the keyboard will be entered. You can see the record button at the top of the screen that indents if recording.

The start synth line looks like the following (apologies for the shrunk graphics, there is a small area to work with Squidoo):



You will see that this only goes upto 31, so here is the next instalment:



So what we have is the following:

A-4 01 65 ::: 00 0000

So what this means is the following:

A-4 is Note A octave 4.
01 is VST number 1
65 is the volume of the key when it was pressed.

Don't worry about the other spaces at the present time.

The beat is very straight forward. Can you see where the yellow lines are that run through the tracks, well that is where our kick is going to go, and all the other beats and frilly side percussion bits are going to follow those yellow lines.

So we need to load up Drumatic. It is a VST so you load it up in the same way as you did with Intro.

However when you play on the keypad you will hear nothing, this is because drum machines are different. They are not synths that use all the octave ranges, they use only F2. And when you press F2 and then press the keys from Q to P you will hear the sounds.

Inside Drumatic (by double clicking on the Drumatic name in the VST section) you will notice that the first/ default sound is TR808, you can click on the little blue arrows to the right or left to change the kit. I use the Brutal kit.

So again we click on record and we insert our kick drum (track 02):



Continue with the kick all the way down to the bottom of the page.

There is a little synth riff that rumbles on in track 03 is made up from another sound from the Intro VST.

So we load up another Intro VST into our VST space and then find the sound Harsh Toned- RM. This compliments our intro synth and the drum kit.

It should look a little bit like this:



And the second part of it:

See how easy it is to build up a track. If you have a good sound then it become much easier than if you booted up the composer software and sit staring at the screen.

I am going to save part 2 of this tutorial for a little bit.

However, there are things that you could start to do today to your music.

These things are what I call replayability elements.

These are what?

1 Brings people back to your tune

2 Gets them toe tapping

3 Makes the song spreadable

4 Makes people talk about your tunes

5 Gets them trying to figure out "how you did something"

You see, techno music making is actually a slight marketing aspect. Luckily you are the maker and marketer of your own product which is great as you are involved in the design process...you will make a tune that is marketable.

For me, I try to:

Listen to what people talk about,

I try and listen to other artists,

I try and see who is at the top slot in Internet charts,

What is in the top slot in general charts

Listen to something completely obscure or out of my genre. This is a great one as it lets me think of hooks and repeatability techniques that are really cool. Want an example?

Recently I have been listening to classical music. I have to admit I was skeptical as the next person to how this would change my music. But you have to listen to the right classical pieces.

Check out the first piece War Of The Worlds, and the second video is Klaus Doldinger "Das Boot".

It is hard to create replayability. What I have done is to test my other songs. If I put them all on the same webpage and track them, I will know what gets downloaded more.

Therefore I have already figured out what my audience wants. I then create more of the same.

So in Stop20 I have done the 5 following ways to increase replayability:

1.Having small effect sounds being played at the start. This alerts the ear and you concentrate on that sound for a second, so to hear the track without being distracted you need to play the song again :) It also adds variety. These FX sounds can be found easily on the Internet by typing in "analog synth effects WAV". You will then be presented with site upon site of samples. Choose the ones that you like.

2.Having different parts within the song. This does cause the track to jump around, but it also makes sure that the track doesn't become boring (which is a major bugbear of mine when I hear tracks).

3.Having strange sounding beats. It is not just your normal beat being played, we have tampered with the samples and then that makes your song stick out from "samey tracks".

4.Having leads competing for the top spot. I have made small hooks to catch the listeners ear. So if they don't like the intro synth, then at least they might like the bassy synth.

5.A track should be a pleasure not a chore to listen to. This track is not that long- just over 3 minutes. I don't like tracks that get boring by repeating the same synth line for ages, or just by adding a drum. Most musicians forget that there are actually people listening to the track. Know when to give up and when to stop.

The cool thing is that I have taken one track,

TimeToTell (opens in a new window) which got to number 1 in the SoundClick charts and then started to show you how:

1. How I came up with the idea for the track,
2. How I collected the sounds from free sources
3. How the tracks works with automation,
4. how it was built from scratch,
5. how I mastered it (adding those little touches that make it sound just right) and
6. how I promoted it.

All this information is wrapped up in the Beginners Bible, a 250 page beginners manual to make any techno/ trance or electro music that you want. Also I have thrown in 4 hours worth of video footage to compliment the guide.

You can check it out here: Techno Music Making Made Simple.