Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

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Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by Barfunkel »

My number one pet peeve is more or less the super annoying "the main musical motif only appearing during the breakdown"-arrangement, which is very common nowadays. Many modern techno things can be seen as purely subjective and taste-based, but imo that one simply always and quite objectively makes the music worse than what it could potentially be.

An obvious example and I actually like this track, it just could be a lot better with a different arrangement. There's simply nothing of interest happening before and after the breakdown.


youtu.be/5WKYKQrk_aI

Feel free to share your own complains! You know you love that...
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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by Lost to the Void »

The old breakdown that ends with nothing but a kick drum and one other sound schtick. It`s become the most overused cliche in modern techno.
I agree, doesn`t make me angry, just bored and disappointed.
I only really listen to techno in the mastering room now, so it's not in my life enough to have me yelling at the clouds.
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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by subvers^v »

16ths everything...fuck me, what ever happened rhythmic variation...

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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by ozias_leduc »

Barfunkel wrote:
Sat Feb 25, 2023 11:09 am
My number one pet peeve is more or less the super annoying "the main musical motif only appearing during the breakdown"-arrangement, which is very common nowadays. Many modern techno things can be seen as purely subjective and taste-based, but imo that one simply always and quite objectively makes the music worse than what it could potentially be.

An obvious example and I actually like this track, it just could be a lot better with a different arrangement. There's simply nothing of interest happening before and after the breakdown.


youtu.be/5WKYKQrk_aI

Feel free to share your own complains! You know you love that...
oh godddd. yes. boring long melodic breakdown into just the beat. such a tiresome cliche. the melodies are all super basic and dull too. trance arps? really?

it's funny that all the old 2008 minimal techno cliches are now in the "heavy techno" stuff.

so lame

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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by mindstuff »

Barfunkel wrote:
Sat Feb 25, 2023 11:09 am
My number one pet peeve is more or less the super annoying "the main musical motif only appearing during the breakdown"-arrangement, which is very common nowadays. Many modern techno things can be seen as purely subjective and taste-based, but imo that one simply always and quite objectively makes the music worse than what it could potentially be.

An obvious example and I actually like this track, it just could be a lot better with a different arrangement. There's simply nothing of interest happening before and after the breakdown.


youtu.be/5WKYKQrk_aI

Feel free to share your own complains! You know you love that...
Actually I thought the track was pretty good... I imagine it's written for a club in mind. Keeping the energy high while providing a hypnotic section for people to trip balls to. Plus as I always like to say if you think it could be done better, than do it ;).

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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by Barfunkel »

Yeah I did say that I like the SDB track as well. It just has IMO the potential for so much more. It has nice elements surely. Many of these kinda tracks today lack even the elements, consisting 3 minutes of mostly a kickdrum, then a long breakdown with some crappy "emotional" chords, then 2 minutes of kick drum again. Ie. a typical, modern Bumload track. They are difficult to listen to because of the arrangement.


The SDB track was popular in the clubs of course, so what do I know! I'm too old for this shit anyway. I just feel that arranging the song like that wastes the good elements the song might have and makes the song a lot more boring to listen to, even in a club setting.
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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by speen »

ozias_leduc wrote:
Mon Feb 27, 2023 11:15 pm
Barfunkel wrote:
Sat Feb 25, 2023 11:09 am
My number one pet peeve is more or less the super annoying "the main musical motif only appearing during the breakdown"-arrangement, which is very common nowadays. Many modern techno things can be seen as purely subjective and taste-based, but imo that one simply always and quite objectively makes the music worse than what it could potentially be.

An obvious example and I actually like this track, it just could be a lot better with a different arrangement. There's simply nothing of interest happening before and after the breakdown.


youtu.be/5WKYKQrk_aI

Feel free to share your own complains! You know you love that...
oh godddd. yes. boring long melodic breakdown into just the beat. such a tiresome cliche. the melodies are all super basic and dull too. trance arps? really?

it's funny that all the old 2008 minimal techno cliches are now in the "heavy techno" stuff.

so lame
I agree, this is horrible and cliche
it's trance with a few elements replaced by a techno drumkit

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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by subvers^v »

speen wrote:
Tue Feb 28, 2023 12:45 pm
I agree, this is horrible and cliche
it's trance with a few elements replaced by a techno drumkit
^This. Paul Van Dyk territory, circa '98.
If you can't mix the track in or mix in to the track at any random place then, in my book, it's not techno.
This is trance by formula...

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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by kronk »

subvers^v wrote:
Wed Mar 01, 2023 10:54 am
If you can't mix the track in or mix in to the track at any random place then, in my book, it's not techno.
thats a new one for me... not sure it stands up though :)

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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by Barfunkel »

I kinda wonder when techno became such a "produced" genre? I love well produced music, don't get me wrong. I just mean that in the 90's techno was fairly rough, at least the kind of techno I remember. House, trance and drum&bass were often much more refined in production. Lots of techno nowadays sounds like it took 20 minutes to make the music and 20 hours to mix it. It's very rare for me to hear an interesting riff, nice pads or even clever drum programming. d&b and especially house seem to be in a much better place now, I hear musically interesting stuff all the time.

Ideally, music should have both good musical ideas as well as good production (in the sense that the production should fit the music well, not necessary as being overly polished).

That said, because I rarely search for new techno I don't naturally find the good stuff either. I'm sure it exists, it's just a bit buried somewhere.

This one I liked from 3 years ago! It's kinda very loopy, but it suits the nature of the music well imo.

youtu.be/thXSSJo1MQE

I should try to find more stuff like that one.
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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by subvers^v »

kronk wrote:
Wed Mar 01, 2023 1:00 pm
subvers^v wrote:
Wed Mar 01, 2023 10:54 am
If you can't mix the track in or mix in to the track at any random place then, in my book, it's not techno.
thats a new one for me... not sure it stands up though :)
Well just in my book, as I say. Good techno for me has a flowing composition that is as good at the start as it is in the middle, end or at any point. A decent track can be mixed in or out at any point and serve a purpose if even for a couple of bars. These tracks that have a verse/chorus type structure are just shite, where it is about the whole track instead of the aesthetic. It's a personal opinion. The times I most enjoyed mixing was with tracks that you could mix fast for short periods instead of waiting for some lame build/fade/build/fade nonsense...

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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by ozias_leduc »

subvers^v wrote:
Wed Mar 01, 2023 10:00 pm
kronk wrote:
Wed Mar 01, 2023 1:00 pm
subvers^v wrote:
Wed Mar 01, 2023 10:54 am
If you can't mix the track in or mix in to the track at any random place then, in my book, it's not techno.
thats a new one for me... not sure it stands up though :)
Well just in my book, as I say. Good techno for me has a flowing composition that is as good at the start as it is in the middle, end or at any point. A decent track can be mixed in or out at any point and serve a purpose if even for a couple of bars. These tracks that have a verse/chorus type structure are just shite, where it is about the whole track instead of the aesthetic. It's a personal opinion. The times I most enjoyed mixing was with tracks that you could mix fast for short periods instead of waiting for some lame build/fade/build/fade nonsense...
100% agree with this

What first really hooked me was how relentless it seemed - no predictable breakdowns, no "normal" dance music formulas, no intros - it just kinda went. No waiting for x numbers of bars to do a thing, etc etc.

A lot of current techno is just EDM with a different skin... nothing weird, nothing interesting, just another flavour of the same dance music template

Not techno (for me)

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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by illit_ »

Barfunkel wrote:
Wed Mar 01, 2023 2:27 pm
I kinda wonder when techno became such a "produced" genre? I love well produced music, don't get me wrong. I just mean that in the 90's techno was fairly rough, at least the kind of techno I remember. House, trance and drum&bass were often much more refined in production. Lots of techno nowadays sounds like it took 20 minutes to make the music and 20 hours to mix it. It's very rare for me to hear an interesting riff, nice pads or even clever drum programming. d&b and especially house seem to be in a much better place now, I hear musically interesting stuff all the time.

Ideally, music should have both good musical ideas as well as good production (in the sense that the production should fit the music well, not necessary as being overly polished).

That said, because I rarely search for new techno I don't naturally find the good stuff either. I'm sure it exists, it's just a bit buried somewhere.

This one I liked from 3 years ago! It's kinda very loopy, but it suits the nature of the music well imo.

youtu.be/thXSSJo1MQE

I should try to find more stuff like that one.
Please share some clever dnb you have heard recently, interested to hear what you've found.

The Pøl stuff on this Schimmer release is cool. https://schimmerstuttgart.bandcamp.com/album/lqd016

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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by Barfunkel »

illit_ wrote:
Thu Mar 02, 2023 10:10 am


Please share some clever dnb you have heard recently, interested to hear what you've found.

The Pøl stuff on this Schimmer release is cool. https://schimmerstuttgart.bandcamp.com/album/lqd016
I wish I could help you there mate, but although I've heard lots of good d&b the last few years, I don't remember the names. I don't collect or DJ drum&bass (besides a small collection of some old school stuff, which I would love to play out but never have the chance), so the names don't stick and I don't have them saved anywhere.

The mainstream EDM d&b a la Sub Focus is very horrible to my ears though. It's what David Guetta is to house music.
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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by illit_ »

Barfunkel wrote:
Thu Mar 02, 2023 11:14 am
illit_ wrote:
Thu Mar 02, 2023 10:10 am


Please share some clever dnb you have heard recently, interested to hear what you've found.

The Pøl stuff on this Schimmer release is cool. https://schimmerstuttgart.bandcamp.com/album/lqd016
I wish I could help you there mate, but although I've heard lots of good d&b the last few years, I don't remember the names. I don't collect or DJ drum&bass (besides a small collection of some old school stuff, which I would love to play out but never have the chance), so the names don't stick and I don't have them saved anywhere.

The mainstream EDM d&b a la Sub Focus is very horrible to my ears though. It's what David Guetta is to house music.
Yee same with me, why i was asking :lol: i've heard the occasional interesting tune at festivals. UK is choca with shite dnb parties thouhgh

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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by msl »

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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by quest »

This is something I’ve thought a lot about recently, maybe it’s the result of changes in production techniques over the decades. Techno goes all the way back to the days when a really solid setup was an Atari that could coordinate all your MIDI hardware’s sequences, maybe riding the analog mixer and key gear controls as you printed out the final stereo pre master to ADAT.

Nowadays a lot of people with gear (myself included) find it extra work to use old techniques and just end up printing short patterns from hardware into the DAW as audio and do way more of the work from inside the DAW, and by then you’ve lost the flexibility of keeping parts in MIDI form, so sequences end up converging on the same cliches you hear in other music coming out.

I’m trying to find the best way to block myself from falling into that same trap (that’s basically laziness) in future productions and my only idea is to pre-sequence the drums using a hardware sequencer (Roland MV-8000 in my case) and deny myself from working in the DAW until at least the longer form of the drum section is starting to emerge. Evolving synths, drones, FX etc. could still be MIDI-triggered/automated from the DAW at this stage of the process, but not printed to audio until the drum section is nearly ready to print. Then maybe a final round of back and forth printing multitrack drums and everything else, until all the final audio is in the DAW for mixdown, etc. So all the elements would be kept in MIDI-triggered form as long as possible until everything was ready to print to audio at the same time.

The key seems to be avoiding the types of mouse and keyboard-driven ways of interacting with audio in the DAW that just leads to cliche-sounding sequences. I figure what I described isn’t going to be any extra work per track in the end (dicking around with short audio bits in the DAW really is more work than it seems like, for more limiting results), but will force me to print only “live-sounding” parts once they’re ready to go into the DAW in audio form, at which point hopefully the sequencing is more or less done and only mixing is left.


Anyhow to answer the OP question, my number one issue is how so much techno has sped up recently to the point where the groove is lost. I do like to work on productions at a slower bpm (to hear details better during that stage of the process) and then speed them up as much as they can go without losing their groove towards the end of the process, but I recently played a live PA where I felt I had to play faster than I normally used to just to keep up with the BPMs of what everyone else has been playing at lately, but on re-listening to the recording months later I knew I definitely went beyond the upper limits of where I’m trying to find my grooves.

I think there is a lot of good techno out there at higher BPMs, but it’s a totally different type of groove you have to be after specifically to do well in that range. And a lot of stuff I have heard coming out in recent years does play with a better sounding groove when pitched down. It used to be exactly the opposite!

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Re: Boomers yellling at clouds ie what's the number one thing you hate the most about modern techno?

Post by between stars »

quest wrote:
Wed Mar 15, 2023 7:54 am
my number one issue is how so much techno has sped up recently to the point where the groove is lost.
This.

High BPM combined with completely atonal palette makes for the most boring music imaginable.


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