Minimal techno

Minimal techno strips techno down until every sound matters. A kick, a hat, a click and a bass note can carry ten minutes if they're placed perfectly and change slowly. The art is in repetition, space and tiny variations.

Where it comes from

Techno began in Detroit in the mid-1980s with Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson. In the early 1990s, producers reduced it further. Robert Hood's Minimal Nation (1994) gave the style its name; Daniel Bell made skeletal, funky tracks; Richie Hawtin as Plastikman built hypnotic records from a TB-303, a drum machine and deep reverb. Basic Channel in Berlin overlapped with dub techno. In the 2000s, labels such as Kompakt in Cologne and Perlon in Frankfurt and Berlin, and artists such as Ricardo Villalobos, Zip and Akufen, took the sound toward swung, organic, clicky microhouse.

The ingredients

• Tempo: 120–130 BPM, four-on-the-floor.
• Kick: short and tight, or round and deep, but always tuned to the track's key. It owns the lowest frequencies.
• Hats: an open hat on the offbeats, plus quiet 16th closed hats with ghost notes and a little swing.
• Percussion: rimshots, clicks, woodblocks and short FM blips, often in 3-step loops (polymeter) and panned around the stereo field. Claps used sparingly, sometimes only every second bar.
• Bass: short notes, often a single note and its octave. The classic is the rolling offbeat bass, landing between kicks. Sidechain it to the kick and keep it mono.
• Chords and melody: often none. When present: a single stab (m7, sus2 or a 5th), a filtered pluck with delay, or a resonant acid line.
• Texture: filtered noise, room tone, vinyl crackle, a chopped vocal syllable.

How minimal techno creates variation

• Automation: filter cutoff, envelope decay, delay feedback and reverb send drifting over 16, 32 or 64 bars.
• Add and subtract: every 8 or 16 bars, bring one element in or take one out. Never change two things at once.
• Polymeter: 3, 5 or 7-step loops against the 16-step bar.
• Probability: on hardware like Elektron boxes, steps play only some of the time, so the loop never repeats exactly.
• Microtiming and swing: nudging hits off the grid.
• Breakdowns: remove the kick, let the texture and percussion hang, then bring the kick back at a phrase boundary.

Polymeter: less, but moving

Minimal lets a few elements move slowly instead of building to a drop, and its main trick is polymeter. Give a percussion loop 3, 5 or 7 steps instead of 16 and it slides against the bar, landing on a different beat each time round. A few short loops at odd lengths can take dozens of bars to line up again. That's how a “static” minimal track keeps changing for ten minutes without anyone touching it.

Use the − and + next to each track to change its length. The counter in the machine tells you how long the full pattern takes to repeat: the least common multiple of the loop lengths.

The polymeter machine loads here.

Arrangement for DJs

Tracks are long, usually 6 to 10 minutes. Start and end with 16 to 32 bars of mostly drums so DJs can mix in and out. Structure everything in 16 and 32-bar phrases. Keep the low end simple and mono, high-pass everything else, and leave headroom.

Sound design recipes

Play each sound here, then open it in the synth lab to take it apart.

Build a minimal track, step by step

1. Set 126 BPM, swing around 10% (0% is straight).
2. Kick on every beat, tuned to your root. Open hat on the offbeats.
3. Add a rim in a 3-step pattern and quiet swung 16th hats.
4. Add a rolling offbeat bass on one note; occasionally hit the octave.
5. Add one stab or blip, with dotted-eighth delay, appearing only once or twice per bar.
6. Arrange 64 to 128 bars by adding and removing one element at a time, and automate a filter across the whole thing.

Hear each groove here, or open it in the groove machine to change it.

Listening list

• Robert Hood, Minimal Nation (1994)
• Plastikman, Sheet One (1993) and Consumed (1998)
• Richie Hawtin, DE9 | Closer to the Edit (2001)
• Akufen, My Way (2002)
• Ricardo Villalobos, Alcachofa (2003)
• Kompakt's Total compilations and the Perlon catalog