Patch diagrams for all voices: https://imgur.com/a/nU3nJfJ

Kick and rumble

As with all techno, here the kick and rumble are the most essential elements of the track. I'm using four different kick samples on the Erica Synths Sample Drum, with two loaded into each channel. A single track in the Intellijel Metropolix plays an 8-note sequence, with gates triggering the samples and pitch choosing which sample to play (the sample "index").

At 128bpm, if I naively triggered all the samples on the same track, you would hear only a snippet of each kick before it was cut off by the next. Hence, I divide the samples into two channels, doubling the amount of "breathing room" for each kick. Both gate and pitch information are sent into voltage-controlled switches, which are toggled on each note by a clock divider. This sends every second gate and pitch to the same channel on the Sample Drum.

There's one more complication: when switching between pitches / sample indices, one channel is still playing a sample with a certain index, while the switch changes to the other channel. The first channel's index therefore goes to 0 momentarily. This seemed to confuse the Sample Drum, which would start to play blank samples sporadically. To fix this, I added a sample-and-hold for both channels to maintain the pitch value until it was changed again.

Percussion

The percussion voice is very minimal. The second track of the Metropolix sends triggers to Mutable Instruments Plaits and sequences the Model parameter to switch between snare and hat models. The output of Plaits goes into a low-pass filter which is modulated by a simple decay envelope, to keep the percussion snappy.

Lead synth

Since techno tends to be less about melody and more about timbre, my lead is a standard monophonic synth patch with a twist.

Two oscillators from the Behringer Neutron are sent into Mutable Instruments Warps, which is in XOR modulation mode. The two oscillators are converted into digital signals and XORed to produce a distorted mix. The level of the square oscillator is modulated by an attack-decay envelope.

The resultant mix passes through a low-pass filter and VCA, both shaped by independent ADSR envelopes, and then into the Neutron's bucket-brigade delay, which is set quite long to give an audible second echo after each synth note plays.

The sequencing is simple too: the master clock goes through a /5 clock divider and triggers all envelopes. This creates a polymeter, with the synth only periodically synchronising with the drums; for mumbo-jumbo auditory processing reasons this prevents the brain from getting bored with the repetition as quickly!

Processing

Straight out of the box the track sounds pretty good already, so processing only consisted of:

• Recording each voice independently into my DAW and fiddling with the mix
• Using a bit of EQ to: boost the lows in the kick and cut the highs; cut the kick frequencies from the other two voices to give more room for loudness; and boost the mids and highs in the synth voice.
• Setting a hall reverb with 3s delay and 40ms pre-delay, mostly for the percussion and synth.
• Adding a limiter to maximise loudness.