How to Make Dub Techno: Chord Stabs, Delay Throws and Hiss

What is dub techno and what tempo is it?

Dub techno is techno's repetitive four-on-the-floor structure combined with the echo, reverb and live mixing techniques of Jamaican dub. It is usually slower than conventional techno, with sources putting typical tempos between roughly 110 and 125 BPM^[1]. A catalog analysis of 182 dub techno tracks measured a median of 125 BPM, with half between 120 and 128 BPM and 76% in minor keys^[2].

The sound was defined in Berlin by Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, who founded Basic Channel in 1993 around Ernestus's Hard Wax record store and released their first nine 12-inch singles between 1993 and 1994^[3]. One trait from dub matters most to you as a producer: the mixing desk is treated as an instrument^[1]. Much of the track happens on the send knobs, not in the notes. If you want the reggae side of that tradition, the guide to making dub music covers it.

How do you make a dub techno chord stab?

A dub techno chord is a short, filtered minor chord, usually a minor seventh or minor ninth, played once per beat or less on an off-beat and then smeared by delay and reverb. The dry stab should be short and dull; the effects make it big.

Voice the chord in the middle register, roughly C3 to C4, with close spacing. Leave the root out of the stab if the bass is already playing it. Two chords a whole step apart, or one chord for the entire track, is normal for the style.

1. Build the patch
   Two saw or pulse oscillators, slightly detuned, into a 24 dB low-pass filter. Set cutoff low, somewhere around 500 Hz to 1.5 kHz, with a little resonance.
2. Shape it short
   Amp envelope with zero attack, decay around 100-300 ms and no sustain. A filter envelope with a similar decay adds the soft click at the front.
3. Place the hits
   Put the stab on the off-beat 8th or on a syncopated 16th once per bar. Fewer hits leave more room for the echoes.
4. Add slow movement
   Automate or LFO the cutoff over 16 to 64 bars. The chord barely changes note-wise, so the tone has to evolve.
5. Resample the stab
   Bounce a few bars with effects to audio, then chop and re-trigger the tails. Old hardware grit and happy accidents often come from this step.

How do you set up dub delay throws and feedback?

Put a tempo-synced delay on a send, set feedback high enough for several repeats, and put filters inside the feedback path so each repeat gets darker and thinner. Then throw single stabs into the delay by automating the send level up for one hit and back down.

This is the same idea as the tape echoes dub engineers used. Roland's RE-201 Space Echo, introduced in 1974, had a record head, three playback heads and built-in spring reverb, and it could feed the delayed sound back into the record head^[4]. Tape saturation and transport wobble made each repeat degrade naturally. Modern plugins recreate this. Ableton's Echo, for example, has high-pass and low-pass filters with resonance, Noise and Wobble options that imitate vintage gear and tape, and a reverb that can sit inside the feedback loop^[5]. The TAL-Dub-X review covers a dedicated dub-style delay.

Keep your hand on the feedback control during a live take. Pushing it up for one or two bars at a phrase end, then pulling it back, is one of the signature dub techno moves. Use a limiter on the delay return so a runaway loop never clips.

What reverb works for dub techno?

Use a long hall or plate on a send, with a decay of several seconds, a high-pass on the return and the delay feeding into it. The reverb should turn the echoes into a haze that sits behind the kick, not in front of it.

Routing order changes the sound. Delay into reverb blurs each repeat. Reverb inside the delay feedback loop, as Echo allows, makes every repeat more diffuse than the last. ValhallaSupermassive is a free option built for huge reverbs and delays, with 22 modes and several that filter inside the feedback path^[6]; the Supermassive guide explains its modes. Cut the reverb return below about 250 Hz and consider a gentle sidechain from the kick, so the tail swells between beats.

How do you add hiss and noise textures to dub techno?

Add a quiet, continuous layer of tape hiss, vinyl crackle, room tone or filtered noise under the whole track. In dub techno the silence between hits is part of the music, and a noise bed makes that silence feel like air instead of digital black.

Keep it low: the noise should be noticeable when you mute it, not when it plays. For generating noise from scratch, the guide to white, pink and brown noise explains which color to start from.

• Tape hiss Filtered white or pink noise, low-passed around 6-10 kHz and high-passed around 1 kHz. Constant and smooth.
• Vinyl crackle Sampled or generated crackle, panned wide. Gives the impression of an old dubplate.
• Field recordings Rain, traffic or a quiet room, heavily low-passed. Adds a sense of place without pitch.
• Noise inside the effects Delay plugins with a noise option, such as Echo's Noise control^[5], put the hiss where the echoes are.
• Ducked noise Sidechain the noise bed lightly to the kick so it breathes with the groove.

How minimal should dub techno drums and bass be?

Very minimal. A rounded kick on every beat, a closed hat or shaker on the off-beats or 16ths, a rimshot or muted clap on 2 and 4, and a deep sub bass that holds long notes on the root. Everything else is echo.

Choose a kick with a soft attack and a warm tail rather than a clicky, distorted one. Swing the hats slightly and vary their velocity, then send them lightly to the same delay as the chords so the whole track shares one space. The sub should be a clean sine or triangle below about 100 Hz, mono, with notes that last a bar or more. For more ideas on keeping a sparse groove moving over time, see the minimal techno groove guide.

How do you arrange dub techno like a live dub mix?

Build one strong 8- or 16-bar loop, then create the arrangement by muting parts and riding sends and filters in real time, the way a dub engineer mixes a tape. Record several passes and keep the best. Tracks commonly run 7 to 9 minutes.

At 122 BPM one bar lasts about 1.97 seconds, so 240 bars comes to just under 8 minutes.

1. Build the full loop
   Kick, hats, rim, sub, chord stab, noise bed and both effect returns playing together. Make it hypnotic enough to listen to for five minutes.
2. Map your mixing desk
   Map chord send levels, delay feedback, stab filter cutoff and track mutes to a controller, or prepare automation lanes for them.
3. Record a live pass
   Play the loop for 8-9 minutes and perform: start with drums, fade the chords in over 32 bars, throw stabs at phrase ends, drop the kick for 16 bars in the middle.
4. Do two more takes
   Each pass will differ. Keep the one with the best middle section and patch in moments from the others.
5. Tidy the edges
   Make sure the first and last 32 bars are mostly drums so DJs can blend them, then check the delay returns never clip.