Acid Sequence

Dub techno

Dub techno: the chord is the easy part

Any synth will give you a filtered minor chord in five minutes. What makes it dub techno is everything that happens after the note stops: echoes that land in the gaps between kicks, repeats that sit thinner and darker than the dry chord, a bass that leaves them room, and a mix that keeps changing, slowly.

So make the chord quickly and spend the evening on the return channel. Where a single stab sits, how the echoes are filtered and when you ride the feedback are composition, not mix polish.

Acid Sequence Editorial · Published · Opinion

A nice chord that goes nowhere

Load a saw patch, play C, E flat and G, and close the filter halfway. It sounds fine: warm, a little melancholy, much like the preset called "Dub Chord 04" in half the sample packs you own. A minute later it still sounds fine, which is the problem. Nothing moves, and nothing suggests a room or the passing of time.

Now send one of those stabs into a delay whose repeats are thinner and duller than the chord, landing a dotted eighth later, and let them fade under the next hit. The chord hasn't changed. The track has. Dub techno lives in the gap between a note and its echo, and you build that gap on the return channel, not in the synth.

The mixing desk was always the instrument

That isn't a modern shortcut. Dub reggae was made at the mixing desk, and Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald carried that into techno in early-1990s Berlin, as Basic Channel and later Rhythm & Sound. Their records gave rise to the term "dub techno" (The Quietus, 2009), and von Oswald insisted on mixing by hand. Introducing Rhythm & Sound's "Mango Drive" at the Red Bull Music Academy in 2008, he said the track was "done completely live in the mix".[1][2]

Mike Schommer, who started Deepchord with Rod Modell in the 1990s, describes the same order of work: shape the effects on the main hook first, then drop in a kick as a metronome. His complaint about early DAWs: "All I wanted to do was stack 12 reverbs and six delays on a chord hit!" (Future Music, 2017). Twelve reverbs isn't the lesson. The order of work is.[3]

A sketch you can build tonight

Here's one way to build it with a stock synth, delay and reverb in any DAW, at around 122 BPM. The numbers are illustrative starting points, not a recipe or an official setting.

Start with a short chord: a minor triad or minor seventh from detuned saws, next to no attack, a 150 to 300 ms decay, no sustain and the low-pass about halfway. Play one or two stabs a bar, not four, starting on the off-beat after beat one. A held or busy chord fills the space the echoes need.

Put the delay on a return, fully wet, so the send decides how much of each stab is echoed: a dotted eighth, with feedback around 40 to 60 per cent. EQ the return with a high-pass around 300 to 500 Hz and a low-pass between 2 and 4 kHz. That makes every echo thinner and darker than the dry chord, but all by the same amount. For repeats that darken one after another, the filtering has to happen inside the feedback loop, which some delays do internally. Ableton's Echo can also put its reverb within the feedback loop, so each repeat blurs a little more than the last.[4]

Keep the kick plain and the bass short, on the root and below about 100 Hz, and side-chain the delay return to the kick so the echoes duck under it and swell back between hits. Then automate the send: throw one stab hard into the delay every eight or sixteen bars and let the feedback carry it. That's the desk move. Over 32 or 64 bars, drift the chord's cutoff, or mute the dry chord for a phrase and leave only its echoes.

Harvey Jones, who produces as El Choop and Pizza Hotline, told Ableton in 2024 that the main thing with delay and echo is to "divorce it from the source signal", and he cuts a delay's highs and lows before distorting it. An echo that sounds like a copy of the chord just makes the chord longer. One that sounds different makes a space for it to sit in.[5]

Timing matters as much as tone. A dotted-eighth echo moves three sixteenths at a time, so its repeats walk across the bar and sooner or later one lands on a kick. Put the stab on the sixteenth just after a kick and its first, loudest repeat hits the next kick and gets buried. On the off-beat, it's the second repeat that collides. One sixteenth later, the third, by which point the echo is quiet enough to sit underneath. Same chord, same delay, different groove.

Feedback is a fader, not a setting

Feedback is where the drama is, and where things go wrong. Low, and each echo dies before the next stab. Around halfway, repeats overlap and build. Near the top they stop decaying and the delay starts playing itself. Riding it up for two bars and back down is a dub gesture. Leaving it there is how you lose the mix, and possibly a tweeter.

Roland's tips for its own Space Echo plug-in are refreshingly blunt: take the Intensity towards self-oscillation, but "don't push it too hard, or you'll fry your ears", and consider a limiter after the delay. Automate it back down, too, rather than trusting yourself to catch it.[6]

Unfiltered repeats also carry the chord's low mids with them and pile up under the kick and bass until the track turns cloudy. Dub techno can be foggy. It can't be muddy and still work on a big system.

There's no house setting

It's tempting to treat dub techno as one sound: slow, misty, a minor chord in a cloud. Early Basic Channel doesn't fit neatly. Looking back at the 1993 single "Phylyps Trak" for Resident Advisor in 2019, Kirk Degiorgio contrasts it with the sparse dub techno the label went on to launch: it's "busy, relentless and intense".[7]

Nor were the people making it working to a genre brief. Schommer says "dub techno" wasn't in Deepchord's vocabulary at the start. Modell told The Quietus in 2016 that he doesn't really feel he makes techno, or dub, and that in his music "the ambience is the main part", with the kick and bass incidental. A club record needs a firmer low end, and is no less dub techno for it.[3][8]

So treat the sketch as a set of relationships rather than settings: a short source, an echo darker than it, room in the rhythm for the echo to speak, a clean low end, and change slow enough to feel before you notice it. Copy someone's numbers and lose the relationships, and you've got a nice chord with a delay on it.

Spend the evening on the return

You don't need another delay: any stock delay with feedback and a filter will do. Make the chord in five minutes. Then spend the evening on the return: move one stab a sixteenth and hear where its echoes land, ride the feedback for two bars, pull the return's low-pass down over a minute. When the echoes feel like a second part rather than an effect, you've got a track. Save the chord preset if you like. It was never the point.