Techno
Turn your expectations around. In most styles harmony is the engine. In techno harmony is one of the things you can leave out, and very often that is exactly what happens.
- often 1 chord
- straight sixteenths
- 125 to 140 bpm
In which styles
- Techno
- Minimal
- Industrial
- House
In short
A great deal of techno sits on one minor chord, or on a single bass note with no chord at all. What replaces harmonic movement is timbre: filters opening, resonance rising, layers entering and leaving, and the same two bars reading differently every time they return.
Machine-like on purpose, and physical because of it. The immovability is the point rather than a limitation.
How the style works
Melody exists and is never the subject. A techno motif is usually one or two bars, covers a small range, often no more than a fifth, and repeats exactly. There is no question and answer, because an answer would imply an arc.
Where you run into this
- A track built from one bar repeated for six minutes
- A filter sweep that functions as the entire chorus
- A bass note that never changes and never gets boring
What you leave out
A chord progression that changes every four bars. It is the most common mistake: a progression tells the listener what time it is, and that destroys the timeless effect the style is built on.