Of course it's very subjective but i really like this one. It's a loop but a damn good one. With very subtle changes. Exactly what i need to get into a real trance while dancing.

One thing i love about some dub techno is that the music is just there. It doesn't want anything from you, no breaks, no drops, no structure...

yet very few producers work this way anymore (analog production and analog mix) and the majority of underground dance music is recorded with cheap 'made in china' convertors and mixed in a daw instead of an analog console so its cold and flat.

Well now you're talking about analog production and mixdowns, which isn't the same thing as live-take arrangements. I don't think it's worthwhile getting bogged down into yet another dull analog vs. digital debate. Good results can be achieved in either domain, particularly in genres like dub techno which are heavily dependent on experimental FX chains. Rod Modell alone is proof of this.

As to "cheap chinese converters," straw man arguments notwithstanding, most budget converters these days are likely better in quality than those in revered hardware of BC's day.

I completely disagree and I find it amusing that dub techno heads are still talking about records that were made in the early 90's and why so few producers these days can come close sound wise.

Analog is a major factor and a huge point of difference. Coming from being itb to producing and mixing analog I can attest to this first hand.

eg. I've 100+ delay plugins and none of them come anywhere near my roland space echoes or my tc2290 and other gear for feeling and presence. Look at the newer Wellspring unit for example, plugins cant come close to how this unit sounds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH-IXMs7j5k&t=137s

Regarding convertors it was Mike Huckaby who told me if you dont spend $1500+ on convertors your music will sound thin and garbage. Do you think Mike Huckaby was a strawman?

Analog has depth, warmth and imperfect detail that digital (binary) doesn't provide. If anything, Dub techno with its minimal nuance and detail needs this more than any genre. Live performance with actual hardware, musicianship has a lot to do with why these tracks are timeless and have lasted imo.

I won't pretend analog pieces don't have a tangibly impactful sound -- it'd be hypocritical of me as I sit here eagerly awaiting UPS delivery of a Hendyamps Michelangelo . But the question IMO is whether dub techno as an abstract concept is defined primarily by the sonic nuances of old hardware, or rather by the application of techniques that the old hardware lent itself to back in the 90s -- many of which can be done fluidly and easily in a contemporary DAW setup. IMO its the latter. Dub mixing with real faders and knobs is absolutely no sweat ITB using any of the available midi controller options.

As far as Huck's (RIP) argument on converters, maybe that was true in the 00s and 10s, but the floor for converter quality has come up a long, long way in just the last decade or so. And converters don't much matter anyhow if you're producing and rendering entirely ITB. Mike was a champion of Ableton, Reaktor, Maschine, etc. besides, which goes to show that it's really down to the human and not the gear.

Mike also championed the Waldorf Wave, Roland synths and others, expensive Manley outboard gear, UA hardware etc.. Any great artist understands what is necessary to make great art.

Controllers are not the same or really comparable to an analog synthesizer. Thats a strawman fallacy if I ever heard one.

I dont hear any daw made dub techno today that truly wows me. I'm not refuting that great music can't be made by brilliant artists using plugins and the daw and I often come across dub techno that I suspect is made this way but it just lacks the wow factor in the end. The depth, warmth and detail and that is why people still talk about Basic Channel, Parallel 9, Deepchord, Vainqueur, Huckaby etc..

Expensive hardware is great -- I've owned plenty of it over the years -- and certainly does contribute positively to one's overall sound in many cases. But to your point: a great artist understands what is necessary to make great art, and I'm pretty confident that someone like Mike wasn't out there telling up-and-comers that they won't be making great art until they bought their first Manley compressor.

Controllers can absolutely be used to manipulate software synths and DAW mixing environments in similar fashion as their hardware counterparts. Turning the cutoff pot on a Prophet 5 produces the same sonic result as turning a controller knob midi-mapped to the cutoff on Repro 5 (and besides, most P5 chords in old school BC tracks were probably sampled to begin with). Moving a volume fader on an old mackie mixer produces the same result as moving a controller fader midi-mapped to the channel volume in Ableton. Can software and controllers reproduce 100% of the behavior of hardware? No, of course not. Does the entire concept of dub techno as a stylistic form hinge on those specific areas where software doesn't quite cover hardware? I argue no, and so would Rod Modell, but you're welcome to disagree.

Again, though, we've gotten down the old boring hardware vs software debate, which was not the original thread of this discussion. I'm in complete agreement that the sonic charms of old hardware are not 100% captured by software. If dub techno, to your tastes, is inseparable from those sonic charms then sure -- odds are you're not going to dig some contemporary ITB stuff the same way you would old Deepchord or whatever. But that's a matter of taste, not praxis. My point is that the tools to make dub techno, whether pure hardware, pure software, or hybrid, have never been more accessible today, so the reasons why contemporary dub techno tends to fall short of the high bar can't simply be attributed to the gear (or lack thereof).

I understood your point and I still disagree with it because like I said before I live it daily. If I could sell my p5 right now and use a plugin I would but using an analog synth like a prophet v, how that synth sounds and feels, inspires, the knobs and keys and so on is nothing like using a controller on a plugin and ive tried many of the prophet v plugins. None sound or most importantly feel like the real thing. They are emulations after all. I think when you add this up, drums , bass synths etc it adds up and daw made music is programmed much more than analog performed music so there is a lack of feel and nuance and this is why 'most' contemporary dub techno falls flat. Happy to be proved otherwise so I can sell all this expensive to maintain hardware.

Curious to hear thoughts on this.

http://https://on.soundcloud.com/8e8JMLtuezZ3oeSV7

I like it! It also crosses over into deep tech house or dub house IMO.

Fantastic, minimal in the best way, pulls you right in to the deep dark groove. Nice that it's not just typical 4/4 kicks.

I can easily go more dub than techno if I let myself!

Great work - is this you? Was a vocoder or some kind of filter bank involved, reminds me of Maurizio Domina (in a good way)?

Thanks! Yes it’s me. My new project. No filter bank or vocoder. It’s all one synth chord (4 op fm) into filter, sampled, delay, filter again, sampled, delayed, etc, finding all the groovy parts. Phaser too. Bass is similar, distorted, filtered, sampled, etc.

Yeah I get that. Thanks for listening!

This is p good.

But makes me think about something that has been becoming obvious to me very recently.

I’ve gone on something of a massive dub bender for the last year and a half or so. Buying tons of it, listening to tons of it, and now making it as well.

That said, I’m mostly listening to and buying dub from the 70s and 80s. But what’s been becoming more and more obvious to me is that so called “dub techno” (much like “dub step”) has really become almost purely self referential rather than a crossing of two genres.

Like the synth sounds of “dub techno” are essentially nowhere to be found in most actual dub music, unless it’s modern and explicitly influenced by more dub techno styles (Ghost Dubs is a perfect example, compare that stuff to the other more “classic dub” sounding stuff he does under other aliases).

I was always a bit of a basic channel die hard when it came to dub techno, but the more I reflect on this exclusively self referential place the genre is in right now, the more I realize why. They actually did the combining. They are actually fans of reggae and dub.

I get the feeling that most ppl doing “dub techno” now probably have few if any direct influences from dub music itself.

And this doesn’t have to do with a negative opinion on your track specifically, or your own knowledge of dub or it’s integration into what you do. But I find it all very curious.

I wouldn't be opposed to a lil more dub in my dub techno.

Yeah always seemed that way to me for the stuff that started around 2005'ish.

Glad you like it!.
Really dig that one of yours.

Yeah, at the end of the day I lean more Dub than techno in my taste as well.

Here is another one I got a chance to resurrect and master between jobs today. Same session as that last and mastered with the same hardware chain. These Omnipressors are so kinetic.

There's also the whole Digidub scene (jahtari.org and others), which also leans heavily into Dub, but doesn't use traditional Dub sounds (except perhaps for the bass sounds).

I sometimes wonder if one could merge digidub and dub techno and still have it make sense somehow..

Loving hearing people’s tracks. Really good stuff.

On a slight tangent part of my day job is music playback for various pop starts to mime along to while shooting their music videos (so I hear stuff I wouldn’t listen to ordinarily)

I did this one for Jade and i thought at the time you can probably pull out some loops and dub it out. If you listen at 1 min onwards there’s some dub technoey stabs.

Dub techno goes pop or is it the only genre to never do so?

https://youtu.be/ZEriLZ4VhQ8?si=uYgcmWy6CZiz7e-v