Is your track sounding too laid back or is your arrangement needing a boost of energy in a specific area? If so then this tutorial is for you! These signature tricks are the secret behind the driving energy and sound in genres like Techno. It works on a variety of different sounds and is very quick and easy to execute.

Transcript

So in this tutorial we’re gonna be taking a look at how to increase the drive and energy in your track.

So it might be that you’re making a tune that you want to really smash the dance floor and it’s sounding a bit too laid-back or maybe you’re already working on the arrangement and you’re looking to pick up the energy in a specific section maybe coming up to the climax or the breakdown of the tune. So if you found yourself in that situation this tutorial is going to massively help you out let’s dive in by having a listen to our loop.

So the idea in a nutshell is that we’re going to increase the speed that our rhythmic sounds are looping over. So let me give you a demonstration at the moment we’ve got a bass pan that is looping over 1 bar and to increase the speed that it’s looping over we could do a version that’s looping over just a half bar. So have a listen to how this effects the energy and the drive of this track. Straight away you feel a lot of energy and this is a classic sort of half bar baseline sound that you’d find in techno very often things are looping over a half bar to really drive it forward. Let’s now move on to the hats so we’ve just got an offbeat hat so this is looping over a quarter of a bar. So we could make it loop over an eighth of a bar or a sixteenth of a bar. So again let’s hear this in context.

Just gonna take these down a touch let’s go again. So you get the idea. Let’s move on we’ll do one more we’re gonna have a look at the ARP now. So the art is currently cycling over one bar. Let’s make this a half bar. So again I’ll duplicate it out and let’s have a listen to what we get. So I’m not mad on that I’m just gonna move this note.

In fact what I think we can do here is we can still make it a bar but we’ll just make the feel of it like it’s a half bar. So literally we’ll duplicate this across so it’s playing a bar but I kind of like this vibe that we had with one of these notes up and one down in pitch. So of course if we play just the half bar it seems even faster even more driving. But this feels like a step up from what we had before cuz it’s bar that one note it still feels like it’s looping over a half bar. And we could go and sort of pick this up a little bit more if we had some delay. So let’s have a quick play around with this and I’m just gonna add some filter modulation to this I’ll put it all the way wet so you can hear what this is doing. It’s basically rocking that filter up and down. To get another nice rhythmic aspect to this let’s dial this back in.

You can really hear how much the energy has picked up in this one from where we started. So if you find your tracks are often lacking in that extra bit of energy that bit of drive that you need then give this technique ago. I hope you found the tutorial useful please do let me know how you get on in the comments below this video. All the best take care. Until next time. Happy music making.

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