TOOLS AND TECHNIQUES

THERE’S NO SET PARADIGM FOR HOW TO STOCK YOUR STUDIO

Getting a killer loop or two going is half the battle, but turning those elements into a great minimal dance

track isn’t as simple as just duplicating them across

your DAW’s timeline. Great minimal music often gives the illusion that nothing is changing while making subtle, often nearly imperceptible changes to the sounds that shift the feel of the track over time.

The key to making this work is considering what element you intend to evolve at sound design stage. Filters are an obvious choice; slowly raising the cutoff and/or resonance of a low-pass filter over the duration of a track is a tried-and-tested way to add progression to a repetitive synth loop.

Other synth parameters work equally well though – small adjustments to an amp envelope or changes to the shape and tone of your oscillators go a long way.

Effects have played a mixed role in minimal music’s evolution. By their nature, minimal beats tend to eschew heavy processing in favour of simple, punchy sounds. On Minimal Nation, effects processing is almost non-existent, save for a small dash of reverb added by Hood’s mix engineer, which gives the album a distinctive sense of space. Later evolutions of minimal dance music often use delay and reverb as sound design tools for creating and evolving a groove over time. Dub techno, meanwhile, takes the minimalism of leftfield techno and combines it with dub’s distinctive heavy delay processing.

Even when used subtly, adjusting effect parameters over time is a great way to evolve otherwise repetitive sounds. Recent albums from Discwomen co-founder Umfang are a great example of this – on superminimal tracks like Where Is She, her reverb design is as much a feature of the groove as the synths and drums.

In gear terms, there’s no set paradigm for how to stock your studio. While a lot of minimal producers use a stripped-back hardware setup, you can find just as many working in-the-box and making use of samples. One thing common among minimal music makers is a tendency to limit the sound palette to just one or two instruments. Whether using virtual instruments of hardware, try limiting yourself to a bare minimum of instruments (or a single, thematically-consistent sample pack) and wring as much out of them as possible. As well as giving you consistency, this can also be an inspiring creative challenge in itself.

Punchy drums are a must for minimal styles of dance music. Since you’ll be relying on fewer sounds overall, what’s there needs the power to carry your track momentum on its own. Roland’s TR-909 is an obvious choice, still the go-to machine for much of house and techno thanks to its punchy percussive sounds and tight-but-weighty kick. Of course, the problem with using the same machine as countless others is that it makes it far harder to make tracks stand out. There are countless excellent alternatives out there. Arturia’s DrumBrute Impact and Korg’s Volca Drum are both great for punchy sounds on the cheap, while the MFB Tanzbar 2 or Jomox Alpha Base are both killer minimal machines at the pricier end. Digital synths can be great for creating characterful but punchy percussion too – try an FM plugin such as FM8 or a hardware machine like Elektron’s Digitone for something a bit different to analogue-style drums.

If you’re working with samples, preparation will go a long way. Minimal tracks tend not to use a lot of buss/group processing, so make sure your samples sound exactly how you want before you load them into a sampler. Try creating your own sample packs before you write. Layer drum samples, add a little saturation, EQing, compression… basically anything needed to get your hits sounding their best. Then when you come to sequence your minimal beat, your drums should hit home without needing much mix attention.