How To Make Hard Techno Track

Introduction

OK guys, today I will show you one of the possible options for making a Hard Techno track in Ableton Live. I used the standard Ableton plugins and some VST plugins such as: A.O.M. Invisible Limiter, Nicky Romero Kickstart, Reveal Sound Spire, Valhalla Super Massive. At the end of the article, I will give a link to download the project for Ableton from this tutorial.
In this track I used some Hard Techno samples that you can find on this site. The tempo of this project is 130 bpm. If you have any questions, you can contact me through the contact form on the site.

Hard Techno Kick

For this project I used a pretty hard-sounding techno kick. You can find the original of this sample in the attached project. And here you can hear the already processed kick sound. I added a bit of saturation in the sampler and after that I put a drum bus to give the kick the right aggression and punch.

Hard Techno Bassline

For most aspiring techno producers, the tricky question is, how do you make a really powerful sounding hard techno bassline? In fact, there are many recipes and I often create techno bassline myself in very different ways. This time, I used a send bus to create a rolling, rumble hard techno groove. The trigger in this case will be a kick.
I put several plugins on the send bus, you can see in the screenshot. Delay creates a rolling groove. An autofilter cutoff the high and middle frequencies. With an equalizer, I removed the hum around 200 Hz. Next, I added distortion using the AMP Ableton plugin. The next plugin (Kickstart) I used for the sidechain to make the kick sound more clear and open. Limiter to limit peaks and gate.

Ok, this Hard Techno beat sounds good to me and we can move on.

Techno Synth Patterns

In this track I used 2 techno synth lines. For the first part, I used the Reveal Sound Spire synthesizer. Equalizer cut the low frequencies and slightly lifted the middle frequencies. After a bit of auto-panning, an autofilter with LFO for the cutoff and a compressor for the sidechain.

I also added techno vox, shaker and tambourine to the project. It doesn’t make sense to describe these tracks separately, you can download this project and make sure that these parts are pretty simple.
And now it sounds like this:

Acid Techno Synth

Next I added an acid techno synth part. For this, I used the “Analog” synthesizer from the set of standard Ableton plugins. Next I added an acid techno synth part. For this, I used the “Analog” synthesizer from the set of standard Ableton plugins. After that, I put the Overdrive plug-in to make the sound more aggressive. Next, I used an awesome free VST plugin from Valhalla – SuperMassive. It allows you to create wonderful reverb effects. If you haven’t tried this plugin yet, then I highly recommend doing it. The next two plug-ins are an equalizer for cutting low frequencies and raising the upper mids and autofilter.

It sounds like this:

All together it sounds like this:

Final arrangement

These basic elements are enough to make a simple arrangement. In the screenshot you can see the sequence of parts in the track and the automation of some parameters. I put AOM Invisible Limiter on the master section. For the best results, you can research the Ableton project that I have attached with this article. If you want to thank me, you can use donation when you download the file. Thank!

The final arrangement might sound like this:

Download Ableton Project https://gumroad.com/l/how-to-make-hard-techno

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