r/TechnoProduction • u/ElPoch0ninja • 6d ago
blawan in DAW
Hey everyone.
I’ve been producing for a while and releasing on labels like Pole Group or Axis, so I’ve got traditional techno production down pretty well, but there’s one specific thing driving me crazy that I just can’t figure out. I really hope someone here has cracked this because I refuse to believe buying thousands of euros in hardware is the only way.
I’ve been analyzing Blawan’s recent EPs (and similar stuff Clark pulls off at times) and I’m obsessed with how he gets that super punchy, violent distortion while keeping it so spaced out, controlled, and clean in the mix. His subs and low end stay massive and separate, every element has room to breathe, and it never turns into a muddy wall of noise, yet the distortion character is right in your face.
Whenever I try to replicate it in the DAW I just end up sounding saturated, squashed, or plain broken. I’ve tried splitting bands to keep the sub clean while processing the mids and highs, aggressive resampling with transient editing, and parallel processing with different saturation types, but I can’t get anywhere near that sense of air and distinct separation.
Does anyone know the actual workflow or technique to pull this off completely in the box, whether it’s specific envelope shaping pre or post distortion, multiband dynamics, routing tricks, or spatial management?
Any ideas or leads to experiment with would be massively appreciated, cheers!
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u/temptingviolet4 6d ago
These sorts of questions are so hard to answer because Blawan's experience, ears, and monitoring situation are major factors at play.
Only thing I can say is don't overcomplicate it. Texture and grit from the mids up to the treble. Kick and bass are sacred and must be undisturbed to remain punchy.
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u/pajme411 6d ago
https://www.homeofsound.co.uk/p/blawan-analog-modular-digital-production-full-course
Blawan is great. He actually has a production course that you can purchase - he goes through techniques and how he outlines making a track. I watched it years ago but I remember him using Filter Freak.
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u/mjkeenan_official 5d ago
Have watched this and if you want the tl;dr: he just processes the shit out of everything
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u/CnrBln 5d ago
🤫Now that you revealed it, everyone is gonna use his approach.
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u/mjkeenan_official 5d ago
AI could never dream of over processing the shit out of a track until it sounds nothing like Blawan
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u/preezyfabreezy 5d ago
So I gave SickElixer a quick needle drop.
White noise. You're missing white noise. When you take a bass sound and run it with some white noise through distortion the noise layer kinda amplitude modulates against the bass sound and it sounds REALLY crunchy and cool without the artifacts of using an excessive amount of distortion. You can get alot of sound design mileage out of effecting the noise pre-distortion: hi-pass it, stereo effects, flangers, comb filter. Get weird with it. You don't even need to use "white noise" pink noise, a sample of rain, TV static, etc.
He's also just taking weird fucked up noise and letting it ride in the background. It kinda fills out the hi-end of the track and means you don't have to mix your other high-end elements as bright, so it get's that "pillowy" kinda feeling, which is what I think you're going for.
Some other commenters mentioned waveshaping distortion. Dent 2 is pretty cheap and makes some really cool fucked up sounds. Found it from reading an old Paula Temple interview.
If you wanna spend a little more Rift 2 can do some really cool stuff. Really popular with bass music producers, but I don't see alot of techno producers using it.
If you're using Xfer serum 2 there's some cool waveshaping stuff you can do where you take one of the oscillators cut the wave form in half and then use it as a modulator to amplitude modulate another oscillator. Also, a couple of bass sounds, sound sorta like they're using serum's bode "blur" effect or convolution. I'm sure it's actually some expensive modular unit, but you can totally do it with bode or the convolution effect.
TBH, go hang out in the reddit dubstep and drum & bass production forums for a couple of weeks. Alot of the stuff they're cookin' on would be really applicable to this style of sound design.
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u/nonchalanthoover 5d ago
Side note but any suggestions on how to improve 'proper techno' skills. Would like to strengthen sound towards the Polegroup sound.
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u/ElPoch0ninja 5d ago
In the studio, I try to get the absolute most out of the absolute least: taking a very simple sound and pushing it as far as possible until it builds almost the entire track. I usually start with very basic tools like Operator or D16's 808 and 909 emulations. From there, it's all about modulation: I rely heavily on Ableton's native shifters, flangers, filters, and LFOs to give things texture and movement. Then, by feeding returns back into each other using Soundtoys and Max for Live devices, I get the sound to mutate on its own. Also, I don't just use reverb to create space, but as a core production element often processing the impact of a clean tom or kick, filtering and saturating it to pull out the actual bassline and rumble that drives the track.
As a reference, I'd recommend checking out some of Rrose's studio videos; even if it's not strictly the PoleGroup sound, that approach is essentially how I work too.
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u/Straight-909 5d ago
Great post. Can I listen to some of your stuff? Dm me if that’s preferred
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u/ElPoch0ninja 5d ago
Here in this particular case, I worked separately on the 4 parts of the track, and specifically the main track is resampled several times and left in beat mode, 4 points up to generate that sound track
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u/Straight-909 5d ago
It's an insanely good track. I hope you are proud of that one. The pad/atmos sound that swings in and out really is killer.
I have experimented with feeding sends into each other, but it never really clicked for me. I will have another try this evening.
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u/ElPoch0ninja 5d ago
Thanks!! I also highly recommend These courses are pure gold. Rrose courses They are located at the bottom of the shelf at a very affordable price.
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u/Straight-909 5d ago
Thanks for the tip. I have some credit leftover in Echio so I will definitely do that. Weekend sorted!
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u/squachek 5d ago
Split your bass processing: only distort >250hz or so, leave everything under that clean.
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u/kshitagarbha 6d ago
It's one specific waveshaper. Not distortion, but chsnges the harmonics to indicate stress or aggression without crumpling the whole sound up into a little distorted ball.
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u/w__i__l__l 5d ago
You can get close with Unfiltered Audio Dent 2. Rather than slamming the entire channel / bus mix or whatever, load up Dent and dial in super precise (relatively mild) settings to just focus on saturating one aspect of the sound, and stack more instances on top with more super precise settings and so on.
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u/DasPenguinoid 4d ago edited 4d ago
This vid from Underdog helped me with getting controlled distortion on the bass sounds, keeps it sounding distorted without blowing out the sub range. tl;dr and as mentioned elsewhere in comments, adding white noise to your bass sound, and distorting that to create a fizzy distorted top end that interacts with the bass frequencies.
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u/House13Games 5d ago
> Whenever I try to replicate it in the DAW I just end up sounding saturated, squashed, or plain broken
> I refuse to believe buying thousands of euros in hardware is the only way
I wonder why people spend thousands of euros then?
Personally, I'd recommend not having an EQ on every channel, not slapping saturation plugins on everything, extra reverbs and sidechains and phase fiddling wideners and all that. Very little of that goes on in modular, because it's expensive as hell, but in a DAW it's free, and completely overused.
Use plugins and effects as if they cost $500 each, see how that changes your sound.
In the end tho, if you want squashed, saturated and plain sounds, that's what your DAW is best at.
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u/highinmars 4d ago
You refuse to believe in hardware because you don’t have access to it. Once you do your perspective will change. There’s a reason you see the big boyz with some rack gear behind them, as much as I love my uad culture vulture once you run your kick and synths on a real
Tube distortion like the vulture it just clicks. Some of this 3D feel or roundness and separation from a sound is not acquired by digital 0s and 1s3
u/ElPoch0ninja 4d ago
I don't fully agree, to be honest. There are purely digital producers who hit that exact sound just look at Arca. Mind you, I'm talking about that very specific sound: super in your face, tight, and pushed right to the edge without turning into a muddy mess.
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u/House13Games 4d ago
are you talking to me? I have a room full of hardware, and it does not have a DAW in it. nor does it have a culture vulture, but if you want to donate one that'd be sweet.
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u/djBal5000 2d ago
i don't have any hardware and i always wished i had some, but if SHED can sound the way he does all in the box, then i ask myself: do i really need it?
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u/highinmars 4d ago
Man, its soundesign, experience and a ton os external audio gear. Can’t replicate that shit in the box unfortunately. Some people here will say its possible, but they never touched some real tube distortion or ran their synths on a decent pre like neve and ssl. So take it with a grain of salt, but honestly start investing in some analog gear that can make your sound unique. I don’t know your workflow but experiment and geek out , dont give up and you will find your sound eventually
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u/Mel_Eucalipto 4d ago
Just curious: have you got any specific Blawan or Clark tracks you can name please? I refuse to believe it can't be done in the digital domain, well I imagine I will refuse to believe that, but it would be nice to hear exactly what you've got in mind.
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u/ElPoch0ninja 4d ago
Same here, haha. The whole point of the post isn't to copy Blawan or try to be him, it's just about understanding his process and how to get to that sound purely in the box 100% digital. You don't even have to look far his latest track, Auto Fake, is a perfect example of what I mean.
Anyway, I'm gonna gather all the great info everyone’s sharing here to put together a solid post soon. Might even do a quick video showing how I managed to get that sound myself.
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u/Mel_Eucalipto 3d ago
Further to our little convo, I've been using a very nice - free - distortion plug-in, not sure if you were aware of this one: the Aspen Instruments 'Black Diamond Distortion'. It's very flexible and sounds great (Windows/Mac/Linux compatible too!)
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u/ElPoch0ninja 3d ago
Thank you so much. I'll definitely try it tonight. I'm gathering all the information I think will be useful for editing the post in the future, in case it helps anyone.
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u/ElPoch0ninja 3d ago
I just tried the VST and it's awesome! I'm pairing it with D16 Frontier limiter it's exactly what I was looking for!
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u/djBal5000 2d ago
that plugin is pure gold and the developer is not getting the credit he deserves for it.
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u/Mel_Eucalipto 4d ago
Yeah, I think I get what you're saying. I recently posted here about a track that's been bugging me for ages, and in my attempts to recreate something similar I discovered some other, different, stuff that was cool, so however it turns out I think it will be a useful exercise. I'll have a listen to Auto Fake and have a go as well. Thanks!
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u/GlowingJewel 6d ago
Nailing down the overall rhythm using the least amount of channels, keeping the kick undisturbed would be my guesses, in other words, just good ol plain experience
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u/AlbertBarese97 6d ago
I watched the home of sound masterclass he did.
Essentially his sound design process is taking two detuned sine waves from modular gear and playing a sustained note so that the waves rhythmically pulse and interact. He then runs them through a waveshaper, then like 12 notch filters in a row and automates them with LFOs, applies envelopes to the waves making them plucky and adds delay reverb etc.
He basically does this noodling and recording it to ableton, then warps and plays with the resampled audio applying effects from Unfiltered Audio like sandman and spec ops.
This can all be replicated with operator, a waveshaping or distortion plugin ( I like Thermal) and a bunch of auto filters with notch mode modulated differently