Dub chords

Elektron Gear Model:Cycles
#1

Hello ! Any tips for creating beautiful dub chords with the M.C ?
Sound settings, notes, chords and chord chart ?

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#2

Lots of great ideas in this thread:

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#3

This is pretty good

@DarkDigital might have some hints on how he did it?

Not mine, an album of dub techno on Model:Cycles

Here’s some tips they gave:

  1. I got a good clap out of the chord machine and setting a super fast, random shape LFO to pitch
  2. CTRL All + Sweep for chords and ambient stuff is so awesome
  3. Send velocity to pan to free up the LFO for other stuff
    (Each track has a pad menu, (FUNC+PAD MENU), and you can switch the destination to PAN. This means you can manually set a different velocity for each step of the sequence on that track and do a stereo sweep. This frees up your LFO to do other stuff instead of using it for pan, so it’s kind of a second LFO trick ; (you can turn off vdep so there’s no change in volume.)
  4. Preset lock + Conditional trigger for an extra sound effects track
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#4

Good tips here: Reddit - Dive into anything

  1. For dub chords, chord machine sweep 89 and 102 to 108 are wavetables with the most harmonics and sound sawish. The contour acts like a filter envelope, so crank it up to make the chords nice and stabby. Unfortunately there isn’t a parameter that can be tweaked like a filter UNLESS…
  2. For more tweakable dub chords with a “FILTER” put a trig on three different tracks and make the notes into a minor triad. Use the tone machine for each track and use ctrl all to change the parameters of all three at once. Colour should be set to 1.000 for a saw-like sound. Again, contour is like a filter envelope, but crucially shape behaves exactly like a bandpass filter. Unfortunately the only way to tweak it live is to cram all the rest of your sounds onto the remaining three tracks and p-lock the shape parameter on every trig EXCEPT the trigs on your three tone tracks. Time consuming and impractical but once done you can tweak the “filter” using ctrl all without altering the other sounds (much) - and it does make for a more authentic sounding dub chord.
  3. Endless pads: Use chord machine, turn on sustain, put down a trig and turn the gate up to INF, then set the trig condition to “1st”. Modulate with LFO (fine tune is good) to give it some movement.
  4. White noise/tape hiss: Use the snare machine and remove all of the tone from it so you’re just left with noise. Then do as above with the trig. Modulate with LFO to make it more interesting.
  5. Use the “ENV” mode on the LFO and send a negative value to “dist” to fake a softer attack and make gentler kicks and hihats.
  6. Obviously turn up delay feedback and don’t be afraid to make reverb size massive! Unfortunately the reverb can’t be sent to the delay, but I find a long reverb tail makes up for this somewhat.
  7. Claps are not a friend of the MC. For good claps I like to start with the “golf clap” preset and tweak it from there.
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