Minimal techno drum patterns: swing, ghost notes and polymeter

Minimal techno is about what you leave out. A plain kick, a short off-beat hat, a loose clap and percussion that slowly drifts against the bar. Small timing details do the work that extra sounds do in other styles.

The ingredients

• A plain kick on every beat, with soft ghost kicks that sit a little late and move around.
• A short closed hat on the off-beat with faint 16ths, never on the kick. Open hats are rare.
• A looser clap, often with a ghost hit before the next bar.
• Plenty of swing: around 59% MPC-style swing is a typical home for minimal.

That is exactly how the Minimal style in FURROW writes. Pick it in the STYLE menu and press GENERATE for a starting point.

Swing and timing

Global SWING runs from 50% (straight) to 75%. 54% just loosens a groove, 58 to 61% swings deeply and 66% is a full triplet feel; the kick never swings. Each lane also has its own swing amount, from straight to three times the global value, and NUDGE moves a whole lane early or late by up to 60 ms. Late hats lay back; early rims push.

Rolling polymeter percussion

This is the signature minimal trick: a percussion loop that is shorter or longer than the bar, so it lands somewhere new every time round. In FURROW, open a PERC lane's EDIT drop-down and set LENGTH to 5 or 7 steps. Add DRIFT at 10 to 20% so hits slip to a neighbouring step now and then, and HUMAN at about 20%. For a second layer, set another PERC lane's GRID to 1/16T so it swings hard against the straight 16ths.

Keep it moving without adding sounds

• CHANCE lets each hit play only some of the time, so the loop never repeats exactly.
• SCATTER throws a few random hits onto empty steps, different every time round.
• THIN/THK thins or thickens the groove live, picking different hits on every sweep, while the four-on-the-floor stays.

Kick pumps the hats

For the breathing feel of minimal grooves, set ENV 1 to trigger from lane 1 with a short attack and decay, drag the ENV 1 chip onto the hat lane's LEVEL and pull the arc below zero. Each kick now ducks the hats a little.

When the groove sits, drag it into your song as audio or MIDI, or use the ten separate lane outputs to mix each part on its own channel.