Dub Techno Tips

Welcome to the Studio Brootle guide to dub techno techniques. Focusing mainly on Ableton Live and it’s stock effects and instruments. We cover everything from setting up a chord to processing it with delays, creating movement in different ways and adding noise to the signal chain.

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Dub Techno Tips

Chord unit

First off when setting up a dub techno patch I use a Chord unit, one of the midi effects in Ableton Live. You can use this so that when you press any note on the keyboard it converts it into a minor chord. There are a number of different dub techno chords that work well and you can save them as different presets to use again and again.

Tight envelopes

The key to dub techno chords is a tight filter envelope for a short punchy chord. Then the envelope and the cut off can be tweaked over time to open up the chords. To do this in Ableton you drop the cutoff low to filter the chord out and set up a filter envelope with a really short decay time. The decay time and filter cutoff can be modulated by velocity in Ableton’s Operator with is a great for creating movement in the track too.

I like to make these tight envelopes randomly move over time by adding a Velocity unit in front of Operator and then setting up the filter envelope to be modulated by it, as shown in the image below. The Time and the filter cutoff to move with velocity (which is random due to the Velocity midi effect before it) so you get random changes in how much the chord comes through the filter.

BP Filter (with wet/dry)

Setting up a bandpass filter for a sweeping effect sounds great, especially between two delay units so you get some delays included in the sweeps. Making it move with an LFO creates the sweeping. Sometimes a BP filter can cut out too much of the top and bottom frequencies, and there is no wet/dry on an Autofilter, so what I do is group the filter and then add another empty chain which has a dry signal in it, as shown in the image below. So now you can have a wet signal with the filter and a dry one, and you can mix them and add back in some of the missing frequencies, but still get that bandpass sweeping effect.

Noise in the chain

Classic dub techno has noise in the signal chain from analog equipment. You can reproduce this by adding samples to the signal chain- like vinyl crackle, electrical hum, or samples of burning fire, water falls, that sort of thing and having them delay with the same delay chains as the chords. In Ableton Live you can use the Vinyl Distortion unit and turn up the Vinyl Crackle knob to add vinyl crackle to the signal chain. I like to do this after a chord, but before the delays, so the noise is delayed and reverbed too.

Lots of subtle distortion

In Ableton I add lots of subtle distortion for character, add a about 3 or 4 different Drum Buss units at 10 or 20% wet/dry mix with different settings at various points in the effects chain, to add lots of subtle saturation and drive. Adding them after Echo, delay and reverb units can really bring out the delays and reverb.

Phaser/Chorus with feedback

Phaser and Chorus are great for adding detuning and movement in the delay chains. If you over-do the feedback you can get some alien effects too. Add these to the effects chain and push the feedback every now and again.

Tape flutter

The Roland Space Echo and other similar tape echo devices have been really popular in dub techno. Sometimes they are slightly off and you get a tape flutter effect and the pitch wobbles as these effect units are based on recording and playing back from actual tape. You can reproduce these tape errors in Ableton in a number of ways – you can add delay ‘wobble’ and ‘mod’ in The Echo units and they will reproduce this effect. You can also add a pitch wobble by using the Chorus-Ensemble in Ableton 12 in Vibrato mode, or add a very slight pitch LFO to your synth patch.

The image below shows one of the ways to add this tape flutter by modifying an Echo unit.

You can see these techniques in action in our paid dub techno preset packs (use this code for 60% off: SBCOM60STWD).

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Dub Techno Tips Video:

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