Producing Berghain techno?

[Dusk]

resample much.

Loads of EQ to take off the air on the sounds. let the headroom you leave become the "air" to your tracks.

big verbs chained to soft bitcrushing then sent to other clean verbs.

delay, delay, and delay again.

Minimal sound source, much fx.

This can all be done in ableton very easily. Use EQ and filtering to create the space, then fill it up with reverb, subtle phaser, delay.

Use long fx chains. These are all Basic Channel tricks.

Thanks for the tip. Listened to some of your tracks and you pretty much nailed the textures I'm trying to get.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what kind of sound do you try to start with before running it through all the delays and reverbs?

Never did answer this. The sounds I start with are quite basic actually, for bass usually some square wave SID emulation stuff. The grit in the background will come from just creating a wall of feedback from whatever main pad synth I use run thru all the mess of fx.

A new trick I have been working with for getting that dusty atmosphere is putting an arpeggio on a pad and then bitcrushing that pad a bit, delaying it a lot and then EQing out all the lows and some of the highs. Run that thru a lot of reverb and get it kinda reacting to your kick/bass parts and you have something that sounds like one big filthy whole of a sound, but is really 3 distinct parts.

Also...

The incredible PaulStretch

"This is a program for stretching the audio. It is suitable only for extreme sound stretching of the audio (like 50x) and for applying special effects by "spectral smoothing" the sounds. It can transform any sound/music to a texture."

Recommended.

[BigPoe]

Sh¡t, this thread has taught me a lot, never thought the answers would be found in Berghain techno

[ewinz]

lets continue the thread! today I was working on a track, Im happy with the bassline, the kick, the hat, snare, I put some synth too, but the track just look minimal, not so heavy, 2 weeks ago, I did a remix and it was really powerfull as I whant, so its kind of random, maybe Im not so experimented in this type of soud, but in my actual track, I cant find anything to render it more heavy..

[Phurniture]

Richie Hawtin never used compression.

Who told you that?

http://www.audiohead.net/interviews/ric ... ndex2.html

[JonasEdenbrandt]

one thing to make tracks feel more "heavy" is having more than just the kick hitting on the heavy beats. Like Len Faki almost always has noise and perhaps a very short decay Hat on the same beats as the kick hits.

[Roqqert]

Richie Hawtin never used compression.

Who told you that?

http://www.audiohead.net/interviews/ric ... ndex2.html

because he doesnt know how it works. Compressors are mainly quite easy too understand. Tho most of the peeps abuse them and dont know HOW to control them right..

ARRT baby.... ARRT

[Minimal Samples]

this is great, i love this discussion. Very surprised to hear about the resistance towards compression. Where I am learning it is very much pushed. Interesting stuff

I think the anti compression thing is just a reaction against its over use for pumping the synths that is so prevalent in commercial electro these days.

I use compression when it is useful to add punch or change a sounds profile in an interesting way.

[damagedgoods]

this is great, i love this discussion. Very surprised to hear about the resistance towards compression. Where I am learning it is very much pushed. Interesting stuff

I think the anti compression thing is just a reaction against its over use for pumping the synths that is so prevalent in commercial electro these days.

I use compression when it is useful to add punch or change a sounds profile in an interesting way.

It's over-prevalent everywhere, but the whole debate originated outside of electronic music, where compression tends to be used somewhat differently (eg to smooth out level fluctuations when recording real instruments and vocalists). It's also primarily concerned with compression in mastering anyway, rather than compressing individual tracks. In EDM there tends not to be as much variation in the level of individual sounds since you're (usually) not dealing with human performances of acoustic instruments. Consequently:

1) You shouldn't need to use compression as often, if you know how to correctly program a synth

2) In situations where compression WOULD be useful, the risk of detrimental effects from overcompression is lower - there's no longer much risk of things sounding "unnatural", since synths don't sound natural to begin with.

IMHO it's totally appropriate to compress instrument tracks AS NEEDED. You can't just make blanket statements like "compression is bad".

The biggest problem is over-compression on the master bus, where you really are making a sacrifice of "dynamic range for the sake of overall loudness". Everything starts turning to sh!t pretty quickly no matter whether you're dealing with EDM or a rock band. The first thing to disappear is the impact of the kick when it drops back in after a break - feels like someone's pushing you with a pillow instead of kicking you in the chest.