PSFMer - Zone [Techno]

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Second installment of my techno learning journey. I have learned a lot since my first techno track, and I hope this one did better.

Big thanks to alias and Certedia for technical and creative feedback!

Also big thanks to Makenshi for supporting it on EQD and Horse Music Herald! And thanks to Araxnus for supporting it on Twitter as well!



Some reflection/rambling:

After listening to my first techno track again after a couple months, I realised that I've made some pretty big mistakes. I didn't have a clear vision of what flavour of techno I wanted to go with, so it ended up being a giant mishmash of ideas thrown together without much coherence. Also, there wasn't much sense of groove in the first track. I had an open hihat dominating the higher frequencies and seemingly drowning out other elements. The overall mix sounded somewhat muddy in the low end, and highs sounded kind of pinched and congested.

In this track, I sought to address those problems. I had a good idea of what kind of style I was going for, which was the sort of dark and repetitive techno found on labels like Polegroup. I studied and listened to a bunch of tracks and they seem to have a strong focus on rhythm and abstract synthetic sounds. And despite the tracks having the same repetitive motifs throughout, they never sound like they stagnate because there is always something changing every 4 or 8 bars. It can be something as simple as introducing a continuous loop of 16th note hihats, or automation of filters so that elements seem to phase in and out of the track smoothly. To address the groove problem, I added more rhythmic elements with changing velocities, like shakers and some syncopated percussive elements in the low mids. I feel like this was somewhat successful. As for the overall mix, I made sure to leave/make space for each element in the spectrum. Also made use of some sidechain compression on the hihats and shakers so that they make space for the main offbeat hihat.

Overall, I think I did a slightly better job for this attempt. I checked the final mix on Tonal Balance Control and it seems to be ok in terms of tonal balance while comparing to reference tracks. Learned that I should be making ample use of stereo tools to create interest (autopan etc). Also learned that adding gentle saturation on every bus/certain elements will stack up to create a richer and fuller sound and save some headroom.