Getting the groove right in your Techno tracks can be the key ingredient to making them a huge club dancefloor weapon. In this tutorial I show you some of my favourite reverb groove tips and tricks that can help drive your Techno tracks and elevate them to another level. These techniques are so quick and simple to implement and work across so many different styles of Techno. This video comes from one of our most popular video courses – Drum programming. Check it out!

Transcript

Okay so let’s dive in and check out some reverb tips and tricks. First up, I’ve drawn in a fresh pattern for us. This one’s techno style have a listen [Music].  We’ve got some fast shakers in another clip and this is standard for to the floor, three types of toms that have been pitched down and they’re just sitting on the offbeat adding a very subtle bounce, and then we’ve got soft medium, soft medium eighth note hats and then finally that syncopated clap that gives us that really strong techno feel. 

So let’s start with a clap. I’m going to give that a blast of a nice long reverb [Music], and that in its own right sounds absolutely fine. But let’s look at making that fit the groove. You don’t have to do this if you don’t want it, but this is a nice trick that works well. So set up a gate into the side chain is the dry signal, so we’re getting that clap coming in and the reason I’ve done that is we’ve got nice clean transient on the clap, and that makes it easy to sit a threshold of the gate. So when the gate opens, its going to allow that reverb through so let’s crank open the hold a little bit so you can hear it [Music]. 

Now obviously for this to work you need a nice long decay time as you heard before we added the gate. So that’s super important, and then what we’re gonna do is use the hold control to find the sweet spot of where we want the reverb to end. So because we’re using the hold we’re gonna a very sharp cutoff point because when that stops, the release is only 20 milliseconds long so it’s gonna cut off really abruptly and allow us to hear a really solid point that matches with a groove. Have a listen [Music]. So somewhere around there is working for me three hundred and thirty milliseconds and that fits the groove really nicely. Now I can start cranking open the release. I’m gonna keep this short I’m not aiming for anything natural here. If you want natural this is definitely not the technique for you, but let’s make it a little less abrupt [Music]. Perfect! And it now seems like it’s breathing in time with the music. Again we can use like the floor for a standard kind of techno tricks [Music]. So opening it up so it abandons the groove and then snapping it back so that it’s working nice and tight. What else we got, we’ve got our hats. So let’s in these two a reverb  [Music]. So they are going to reverb A and I’ve done the same thing, I’ve set up a gate. This time the sidechain is receiving the hats. So let’s bring that threshold down again I’ll crank open the hold a little bit [Music]. Now because the hats are at two different volumes I can set the gate to open only on the loudest or on both, and that will allow me to set the rhythm however I see fit [Music]. 

So there’s both and there’s one. I’m going to keep that nice and short. That seems like it’s breathing in time, let’s bring this down again but it is a bit too abrupt. So let’s bring that floor up. Now remember the floor is the volume of the reverb that’s getting through when the gate is shut so even though the gate is shut, it’s not annihilating every bit of sound. It’s just turning it down by 40 DB. So if I bring this up, then the effect of the gate is going to be that much more subtle [Music], there’s no gate at all, and there’s a little bit of pumping [Music]. Nice, so that’s working well. Last thing we got to these shakers super super busy pattern so it doesn’t make any sense to worry about gates or getting the timing right on these. Yyou can just go crazy and give these a huge blast if you like works really well in techno, lots of reverb [Music]. So that’s pretty full on. Let’s see we’re getting to see for this [Music].  I could open this up perhaps [Music], might be a little bit much. But again it’s serve our purpose our hearing clearly what’s going on. So on this one, I’ve set up a compressor sidechain coming from the kick drums we get that for to the floor pumping on this big wall of reverb [Music]. Nice, so let’s take some of these tops a bit much [Music]. And we get this really nice pumping and breathing. Now obviously it’s a bit overbearing as before. I’ve over egged this so we can hear what’s going on. Personally I’d take some of the brightness out of that reverb and gets back to a nice darker tones for techno. But using these techniques, we can get this pumping, breathing and really enhancing the groove instead of smothering it with air reverb. So gates and compressors definitely things to get a hang of for your grooves. 

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