Formulas in techno music

[MARKEG]

I just noticed in another post that someone mentioned a certian artist 'sticks' to a formula and inplied it wasn't a good thing. This is an interesting subject.

As techno artists Chrissi and I use formula's. . Ie For our Anxious stuff we always eq things in a certain way. For our acid techno stuff it's different - and so we use a different name. But within each project name we'll definitely have a 'way' that we do things. I think you have to, to get your own sound...

[miromiric.]

yes this is a good subject.
naturally u'll find a certain formula to do things and this is a good thing, cause u can work that style to its maximum. but it often turns into a very bad thing for techno unfortunately. we can roughly define techno as inovation. if u keep repeating something it's the oposite of inovating. u can get interesting music acting in this way (funky stuff), but it's no longer techno.
i see this visually like breaking the wall with dynamite and then letting other ppl to explore that area untill someone gets to another wall and destroy it and so on and so on.

[Paul Zykotik]

I just noticed in another post that someone mentioned a certian artist 'sticks' to a formula and inplied it wasn't a good thing. This is an interesting subject.

As techno artists Chrissi and I use formula's. . Ie For our Anxious stuff we always eq things in a certain way. For our acid techno stuff it's different - and so we use a different name. But within each project name we'll definitely have a 'way' that we do things. I think you have to, to get your own sound...

That'll be me then :wink:

I'm not sure I explained myself clearly. Certainly every producer of music follows a formula in the way they do things, it's part of what makes individual artists interesting. My criticism was aimed not at the formula of the way in which the tune was made, but the formula of the tune itself if you see what I mean! Perhaps a better word to use would have been structure.

I'm one of the first people to defend a lot of techno that pretentious techno-lovers class as "hard loop-based crap", for it's obvious there's a wealth of good music out there, with a number of artists providing plenty of diversity. However, it's when producers start putting out tunes which don't really sound that different from their last production that it becomes difficult to defend such criticism. How many Gaetano or Carola records have you heard recently that have been markedly different from what they've done in the last year or so? Then compare this to people like Headroom, Chris McCormack, Ade Fenton, Ben Long etc. Or, as you cited, the example of yourself & Chrissi - nearly all of your productions can be classed as techno, yet they have very different styles. I'd say the two records you put out on Cluster were very different from each other, but presumably these were made using the same formula as both were done under The Fuzz name.
My personal opinion is that Stanny Franssen isn't really doing anything different at the moment. And he's certainly capable - his G-Force releases from 3 or 4 years ago used to get played to death by me!

[MARKEG]

respect for that mate..

i see what you're saying... perhaps 'structure' is the problem. if you use the same 'structure', you're the same as those commercial trance bods that aren't advancing music whatsoever. structure = sequence. so make your sequece different EVERY time. yes, i can see that stanny has used a very similar formula recently.

interesting idea...

[ampassasinbirmingham]

yeah people deffinantly mean structure not formulae. Like in some records there is a 4 bar intro then into the main tune for 8 bars then a break down etc. some artists stick to the same structure.

[MARKEG]

but there's only so much you can do within structure that will make people go crazy....... of course a breakdown after 2 mins is going to work.... so you're going to do it to get ppl to like your track...

[Dustin Zahn]

I think long breakdowns suck. But i totally agree, I notice a lot of artists and their formulas, and there's no real need to point them out. It's quite easy to get set in that mindframe without really paying attention.