- How is techno different from house?
- Both run four-on-the-floor, but the feel diverges. House sits around 118–128 BPM with swing, chords and vocals; techno runs 128–140, plays the grid straight, and spends its energy on sound design and filter movement instead of songwriting. Name the tempo, the swing amount and the vocal policy and the two stop bleeding into each other.
- What belongs in a techno prompt?
- Work from the machine outward: “132 BPM, TR-909 four-on-the-floor, open hat on the offbeat, no vocals,” then say how it moves — “one new percussion layer every 16 bars, kick drops out mid-track” — then the tone: “dry, cold, short reverb, single-note stabs.” Skip the words chorus and hook, which pull the model toward pop arrangement.
- My results keep sounding like festival EDM.
- That is almost always the build-and-drop shape. Strike those words, ask for “no drop, continuous evolution, layers added and removed,” and explicitly rule out supersaw leads, riser noise and big reverberant piano. Holding the tempo near 132 rather than 128 helps too, since the slower end reads as commercial house.
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