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daryo wrote: For minimal I mean the boring trendy stuff.

Link me some boring trendy stuff.

80% of the decks.de techno catalogue

go to charts/buzz chart on the techno section and listen
i find all those tunes really boring for example

I honestly tried to like the stuff you linked, but it was *bad.*

crytek wrote:Love minimal techno/music in general. To me the though, I think minimal is all about artist like Ritchie Hawtin, Signal, or even Porter Ricks. Just the groove guys like those build with pretty much very basic elements. And they are especially more than what they seem on first listen.

ive got respect for people like villalobos and hawtin, its just the drudgery of minimal rooms in london clubs that i dont like. im sure dc10 in ibiza would be absolutely mind blowing.

but shitty, soullless, uninspired repetition with nothing changing but some sort of fog horn or some shit coming in every 5 minutes, nah. doesnt do it for me and i dont know what anyone sees in it - wait, yeah i do - hipster points!

d1rt1989 wrote: ive got respect for people like villalobos and hawtin, its just the drudgery of minimal rooms in london clubs that i dont like. im sure dc10 in ibiza would be absolutely mind blowing.

Yeah, but sunshine, 40oz bottles of San Miguel and MDMAing it up with girls in bikinis is probably a big factor - not something you can really do in a dark club in Farringdon



Minimal is like anything else - there are good and bad examples of it. You want to do things at a basic level, it'll be a case of an 808 drum kit, two note bleepy bassline, simple melody and white noise/delay/LFO to create your drops. By the books minimal and a bit plod.




Take it a step further and you can just take the piss with things. Villalobos has done 11min tracks that don't have any beats to them, just gradually rising chord sequences.

Similarly, I've heard guys like Hawtin play tracks that do not have a single drop in them for 10mins - watching a whole dancefloor of sweaty vest wearing scenesters worship at the Alter Of Richie™ for 10mins, expecting a drop in the beats so they can take a breather and adjust their wraparounds is fucking jokes.


I've dicked about with a few minimal tracks, and the only advice I can give is lots of automation. You can have a simple track made up of no more than say 7 elements (inc. melody & bassline), then literally do about four or five automation clips for each element running the full length of the track to get some really fucked up sounds rolling out of it.

Bottom line, IMO minimal only becomes boring and repetitive if you let it. Give the track enough of a solid base to still let it be techno in the purest sense of the world, but automate the fuck out of things to give it movement even when 8-bar sections are being repeated.


Oh yeah, and trippy sound effects. I've heard traffic noises, kids laughing, bird songs, all the usual stuff, plus some weirder stuff - mate of mine sampled the sound of his kettle boiling for some sort of weird bubbling perc line; mini disc recorder and mic if you've got them, if not I guess sample libraries online and stuff?

this is what im saying, some of it is awesome, with next level trippy sounds and loads of cool shit going on.
but go out on the wrong night in ldn and you've got none of that, just complete wank.

http://www.divshare.com/download/7790382-4d6
Here's an unfinished tune I whacked together from samples. Crits?

I've been listening to and producing "minimal" for a long time. Although, I was never really in the loop as far as artists and what not as I was playing dnb dj wise, and always just called it dub techno or house. I always liked producing it more than anything and it's still my favorite genre to make.

There's a lot of good tunes coming out all the time , along with loads of classics out there. But, you have to really dig. Way more house and techno or minimal or whatever the fuck is released every day than dubstep. So, you have to sift through a lot of the shit.

As far as tips, it's all about the kick drum. Learn how to make them. You can use most of the skills you already have from making dubstep. Again, the kick. Experiment with layering 909'ish kicks with sampled ones and what not.

Also, don't ever high pass the kick drum unless you have a reason to do so. The kick is generally where all the weight is with a little tick or something higher up the spectrum.

fiziks wrote:I've been listening to and producing "minimal" for a long time. Although, I was never really in the loop as far as artists and what not as I was playing dnb dj wise, and always just called it dub techno or house. I always liked producing it more than anything and it's still my favorite genre to make.

There's a lot of good tunes coming out all the time , along with loads of classics out there. But, you have to really dig. Way more house and techno or minimal or whatever the fuck is released every day than dubstep. So, you have to sift through a lot of the shit.

As far as tips, it's all about the kick drum. Learn how to make them. You can use most of the skills you already have from making dubstep. Again, the kick. Experiment with layering 909'ish kicks with sampled ones and what not.

Also, don't ever high pass the kick drum unless you have a reason to do so. The kick is generally where all the weight is with a little tick or something higher up the spectrum.

Yeah, the only production experience I've had was cutting up the amen and circles breaks. I came into this with no experience at all, and I'm learning as I go.

Wub wrote: Similarly, I've heard guys like Hawtin play tracks that do not have a single drop in them for 10mins - watching a whole dancefloor of sweaty vest wearing scenesters worship at the Alter Of Richie™ for 10mins, expecting a drop in the beats so they can take a breather and adjust their wraparounds is fucking jokes.

You've got to agree that if anybody in the scene deserves an altar, it is Richie though.
But fuck scenesters.

i dunno, i did used to listen to a lot of minimal and tech house as my standard cotching listening, but just got bored of it after a while. i think my home listening just calmed down really, kinda listened to proper hard electro and dnb for yonks and after a bit was just like fucking hell, can i really cotch to this? embraced the dubstep to the max.

sorry if that was an uncalled for life story, bit mashed

This thread reminds me of this song :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCFeodW1piY

^ not my veiw though mind

holly89 wrote:This thread reminds me of this song :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCFeodW1piY

^ not my veiw though mind

hahahahaha, knew what that song was going to be before I even clicked on the link



Dropped that once at a house party where the minimal guy in the next one put on this really fucking dull tabla driven track in the next room

dismissing entire genres out of hand = waste

apart from psytrance

james fox wrote:dismissing entire genres out of hand = waste

Every genre has good and bad elements. I think I got disillusioned with minimal when it first 'broke' over here - there was the usual rush of bandwagon jumping, DJs playing Beatport Top 20 sets, producers churning out crap to fill a gap in the market.

But as with most genres IMO, once the initial OMGZ died away, there was a second wave of DJs/producers who were actually producing decent tunes and doing exciting stuff in terms of their sets and pushing boundaries and other such cliches.

james fox wrote:
apart from psytrance

Nothing wrong with psy - am going to a party at 414 this Saturday for 10hrs of the stuff

IMO, it's all about coupling minimal with dub techno and with harder, crunchier techno. Keep it the same overall vibe, but make it interesting too.

james fox wrote:dismissing entire genres out of hand = waste

apart from psytrance

minimal is infinitely more dismissable than psy! get yourself down to koh phangan and see what you say about it then. it's the same thing (quite an interesting parallel actually) insofar as when you're out on holiday on a ridiculous drug fuelled party island and it's played immensely well, its wicked, then of course when it's played by some hipster or hippie whose bloodstream is mostly ketamine, at a shit club night or party in england, its wank, and those that have never been to the respective island dont know that it actually can be any good.

but id say im a pretty discerning listener of dark, dirty, well produced music, and the morning after the full moon party in kp was probably the best night of music ive ever heard. psy trance can be sick.