Arpeggios for Melodic Techno
A career one can only dream of: In no time at all Space 92 jumped to the top of the club charts with his melodic techno and has been permanently present there ever since. His sound is crisp and the melodies have epic features without becoming too dramatic. So let‘s take a look at how the hookline is constructed in his latest track.
Drama queen
The hookline of „The Game“is announced fragmentarily in the breakdown and really takes off after the drop. As is often the case, simplicity is the key here: the sequence is an arpeggio of 16th notes with the notes D, E, F and G, creating a dramatic buildup. In every second round, G is replaced by a lower C and an A.
Filter trick
The hook sound of Space 92 sounds really nice and analog, which is largely due to the filter. We set frequency (cutoff) to about 11 o‘clock and mod env 1 depth to 3 o‘clock. Set decay to about 40 and all other controls to 0 to get a crisp sound. However, if you drive attack up to 12, it gets really fat.
Peak / Thorn Solo
So that the arpeggio doesn‘t just run through, the sequence starts with a 16th an octave lower and ends with a 16th an octave higher. The exact structure can be found in the MIDI file in the download part for the special. Much more important, however, is the sound we build with the Novation Peak. Alternatively, you can use our Thorn Solo.
Reverb & arpeggiator
If you want the hookline to be a bit sharper, turn resonance to 9 o‘clock. But not more, otherwise the sound will thin out too much. The patch is refined with a bit of reverb with time and level at 9 o‘clock each. As with the resonance, less is more here. Finally, the arpeggiator is activated and that‘s it.
Three oscillators
We start with an INIT preset and turn the volume of all three oscillators all the way up, select sawtooth as waveform and set range to 16‘, 8‘ and 4‘. We also slightly detune the two higher oscillators with fine(tune) +10 and +20 cents. For this we turn noise to 3 o‘clock to get a rich basic sound.
Tight timing
Now we can load the MIDI clip, record the synth as an audio track and use another little trick: In current Techno, dead-straight timing is everything. Therefore we shift the recording forward by about 10 ms. This roughly equals the opening of the filter (attack on the mod envelope) and makes the hookline extremely tight.