ALL ABOUT THE LOOP

When it comes to making minimal electronic music, there are no hard and fast rules beyond the most obvious: less is more. The whole idea involves stripping the music back to just the most important elements and wringing as much as possible out of these core ideas. Throughout the history of minimal music, it’s usually appeared as a counterpoint to more ‘busy’ styles of dance music.

Although it wasn’t necessarily the first minimal electronic record, Robert Hood’s 1994 masterpiece Minimal Nation is one of the most important foundations of minimal techno and is a great place to start when examining how minimal production styles work. Hood has described the sound of the record as a reaction to the increasing tempos and complexity of techno as it spread across the world. In part, it was a record created out of necessity; Hood had been struggling financially at the time, and so the album was created using a barebones setup of synths and drum machines picked up from a pawn shop, using little more than a SH-101, Juno, TR-909 and Yamaha DX1000.

Beyond necessity, Hood also cites a desire to reinject a little humanity into the machine-heavy techno sound. The synth riffs on Minimal Nation were programmed ‘live’ using a Yamaha QY sequencer, resulting in the album’s distinctive blend of mechanised and organic feel.

As is true with most minimal electronic styles, the arrangements of tracks on

Minimal Nation are very simple. Although the tracks do build, with additional elements being introduced as the arrangements go on, there are no real breakdowns to speak of, and certainly nothing you could call a ‘drop’. Effectively the tracks are all variations on one or – at their most elaborate – two basic ideas. Naturally, if you’re going to use this sort of approach in your own music you need to remember that your track is going to live or die on the strength of that main riff. Minimal dance tracks often take a single loop or riff and run with them for four, six or even ten or more minutes. It goes without saying that unless that loop has a certain ‘something’ to it in the first place to hook the listener in, then it’s not going to hold up to that sort of repetition.

Unfortunately, there’s no simple recipe for creating a killer loop, but there are some basic principles to consider to help you get there. Since melodic progression isn’t really a factor here, you should focus your energy on developing groove and interesting sound design. A completely rigid groove is likely to get boring quickly, so try applying swing to one or more elements or nudging a few percussive hits off the grid.

Start with basic elements – for example, some simple percussion, a two or three-note bassline and a chord stab – and spend time experimenting with how they interact. Use accents and velocity to emphasise one or two beats in the bar. Consider what’s going on in each part of the frequency spectrum. Try adding a slide/portamento, ghost notes or reversed percussive hits to help your loop groove a little.