By Brandon Darby, 2025

https://bergaudio.bandcamp.com/music

Berg Audio is a Dub Techno oriented label finding its aesthetic inspiration in the lost monuments located in eastern Europe. Featuring artists such as M-High, Janeret, Diego Krause, Kolter and Traumer, this label absolutely oozes atmospheric and dubby synth sounds, heavily influenced by the Dub Techno relics from artists such as Basic Channel while the sounds on this label stay modern, energetic and dance-floor orientated.

In this article you will learn in detail exactly how you can inject some of this Dub Techno vibe and production style into your music. You will learn how to create dub stabs from scratch, this will teach you in depth techniques on sound design, music theory and more.

Dub Techno Synth Stabs

Basic stab sound design

Lets take a listen to some of the sounds we will be creating in this tutorial (with drums in for demonstration purposes)

As you can hear, there is a multitude of atmospheric synth dub stabs playing off of each other, with lots of echo and reverb. These are the sort of sounds we are aiming to create, they add such a lushness and atmosphere to your music, and can really make your track feel very high energy when you create groovy rhythms with them and utilise call and response, which we will cover later in this tutorial.

The first piece of this puzzle is what I would call “Stab 1”, this is the first stab in the collection and happens on the first beat of the bar, although it could start on any position of your choosing within your musical phrase, it’s important that it is distinctively leading your progression in terms of being the thickest, loudest, and/or longest sound so it’s clear to the listener this the leading stab, or main stab. This will make more sense when we look at call and response.

Here is the sound on its own, processed and then unprocessed.

To create this sound, and any variation on this sound, start by opening up an instance of Ableton’s Wavetable. Firstly, enable the two oscillators and set them both to saw waves within the basic shape category, but vary the wave position slightly, as well as the detuning amount of one of them. These two slight adjustments separate the two oscillators to make them non identical, creating a thickness in the sound and richer harmonics, as oppose to two mathematically identical waves piled on top of each other, which would only create an exact doubling up of the sounds in volume, try it to get an understanding of this crucial difference.

At this point you can by all means experiment with choosing your own waveforms, and the beauty is once you have completed creating this sound in all its steps, you can go back and just change the oscillators to get completely new tones.

If you now program some midi or a play a chord like the one below, i.e an Aminor7 (A,C,E,G) you should have a nice lush sound already.

Something like this:

Quite a nice sound in its own right, experiment with disabling one of the oscillators to see the difference in richness when theres only one oscillator playing versus two which are slightly different waveforms/tuning.

At this point you can also experiment with different chord shapes for different vibes and feelings. I personally like to take the G of the Aminor7 chord and place in below the root note, A. You could even try removing the G for a standard Aminor triad (A,C,E) for a darker feel, or try an Amajor7 (A,C#,E,G#), for a more moody feel.

Moving onto further shaping the stab, let’s quickly adjust the Amp envelope like the image below, softening the attack for a more rounded sound, and lowering the sustain slightly so  it becomes more “stabby”. The subtle softening of the attack will help the sound sit into the mix better, as the transients won’t be poking through in a sharp way, interfering with your drum hits.

With the attack softened, it should sound more like this:

Now this is where things are going to start taking shape, following the image below, enable the 24db low pass filter and set the resonance to taste, then set the filter cutoff to around 100hz or to taste. Then set the Env2 values as shown, we can then go over to the matrix and send Filter 1 Freq to Env2, this will create a short stabby opening of the filter, again the amount you send to Env2 is to taste.

For the final icing on the cake with this sound is a little trick I like to employ which is using my own automation on the filter cutoff, to shape the opening of the filter in any way I want, I am not restricted to just a static envelope, nor am I restricted to the subtle movement of an LFO applied to the filter. What you must to do start with is right click the filter cutoff and choose “Show Automation In New Lane”.

Then, on the automation lane that opens on your midi clip, you can draw in the opening and closing of the filter, and the key is here is for it to move around quickly and over a short period of time, so within that one chord you are playing, the filter is opening and closing rapidly, determined by the shape you draw in. Here is an example of how I drew the automation in (in red), over the course of one bar, with a short length chord.

Let’s see how this sounds now with this automation drawn in. If you listen closely, you can listen to how the filter sounds and how that matches up visually with the automation drawn in.

To make it easier to understand, here is an image of a simpler automation line, and how that sounds.

As you can hear, this is a simple sweeping up sound, determined by my own automation, which hopefully helps you understand what is going on with this automation. As you can probably tell, this opens up a lot of doors on how you can shape the sound of your stabs, you can repeat this automation to happen every time your stab plays by simply copying and pasting it, and to further enhance this technique – you can create subtle variations on these copies over the course of eight bars, making each and every one unique!

Playing with insert effects

Now that we have the basis of our synth stab, it’s time to add some effects to further shape the sound to be more interesting and atmospheric. 

Firstly, to really get a unique tone to your stabs, I like to play around with dual filters which almost give a phaser-esque sound to them. I like to use FilterFreak2 by Soundtoys for this, however a simpler yet more limited approach can be to use Ableton’s Autofilter, which I will touch on later. 

To configure this filtering technique, setup FilterFreak2 with two band pass filters (BPF) each with different frequencies (Freq), medium resonances and both 4 pole. Also set them to be in parallel, which is how you get the phaser sound. This should get you something that sounds like this:

As you can hear, there is now an almost lo-fi metallic sound to the stabs, and this can be changed by changing the cutoff frequencies of both independent filters within FilterFreak2. What is really special is when you start to modulate the two filter cutoffs using the in-built LFO. To do this, set the “Mod” knob to around 50%, then click the white button which should say LFO by default, and change this to rhythm. Choose a shape like sine and a rhythm length such as 1 bar. It should be setup like the image below:

This is going to now move those two filter points around automatically which creates more movement and modulation like our Wavetable filter before! This is how it should sound now:

A subtle difference, but worth it. Playing around with the shape of the LFO, or the Rhythm length, will give you an endless amount to tweak when shaping the sound!

If you don’t have FilterFreak2, then try setting up something similar, albeit with only one filter, using Autofilter. Here is how you could set it up to get a similar result:

To finish off this foundational dub stab, we can add a bit of chorus to widen the sound, this is how I set up Microshift below:

This is going to help the stab sound larger than life in the mix, helping it stand out as a key element of your track. Also, I just love widening synths. Feel free to use Ableton’s stock chorus or any other chorus plugin you have.

Reverb and Echo

Now that we have our unique sounding stab and have a great foundation to play with, we can start exploring special effects such as effect and reverb (essential for atmospheric dub stabs). These two effects will allow you to create groove, rhythm and fill out the space in your track.

First up, it would be wise to set up quite a large reverb on a return channel (you can use this one reverb for multiple stabs) I would strongly recommend Valhalla Vintage Verb for this, but the Ableton stock Reverb or Hybrid Reverb will work fine too. Simply set up a return channel with your reverb set up something like this:

I like to use a large reverb like a the Concert Hall in VVV with a 4-8sec reverb time. The rest of the parameters can be tweaked as you see fit, the key is to get quite a long atmospheric reverb which sounds large. After sending your stab to this, it should sound something like this:

As you can hear, this now has a large reverb tail which adds a lovely atmosphere. Don’t be afraid to add a second reverb return channel, if you want extra atmosphere or a different flavour or reverb over the top, it’s like layering drums or layering synths, but with with reverb. What I will usually do is have a longer reverb that I only occasionally send my stabs to, and I automate the amount that gets sent there to build up in a breakdown for example.

Next we can add some echo, which is a super key part of this style of Berg Audio dubby house.

Similarly, we can set up another return channel, this time with an echo plugin of your choosing, I have a soft spot for Ableton’s Echo, it can pretty much everything I need it to do and it’s easy to use, but Soundtoy’s EchoBoy is another banger.

I have set up my echo as follows, and it ends up sounding something like this:

You can experiment with a few things here such as the filter on the echo, the feedback time, the echo length, ping pong or stereo and also for extra atmosphere, you can try adding some of the reverb built into the echo plugin.

Creating more layers, call and response, different chords

In essence, we have now created a perfectly usable dub stab that has all the ingredients to make it sound good – a good synth sound to start with, filter modulation, reverb and echo, and you could just leave it here. However, creating some more variations on this stab will take your production much further, you will be able to experiment with creating call and responses between multiple different stabs, using different chords for each stab and essentially creating a melody that gives your track its identity. This is what we will look at now.

If we add our next stab in, we can start to build up a groove, something like this:

As you can hear, this has added another dimension and there is now an interplay between our first stab and this new second one, they are both responding to each other in the form of “Call and Response”. For those who don’t know, here is a quick definition of what we’re talking about: 

Call and response in music is a technique where a “call” phrase (stab) is followed by a “response” phrase (stab), often by a different sound or instrument. This creates a conversational musical exchange, common in various genres.

To put it into context within these dub stabs, our first stab is our call, and our second one our response. I like to visualise this and see it in a sequence (over 2 bars in the image below):

For our response synth, we can use a different chord and rhythm. Here I have used these chords:

These two chords are Aminor9 (A,C,E,G,B) with the G underneath the A like before and the B directly above the A. This keeps them sounding similar to our first stab, yet with a slightly different flavour, of course you could experiment with using completely different chords in the key of A minor, such as a Dminor, a Cmajor etc. This will give you more movement and melody, and can really create a dramatic feeling. Try it and see what flavour it gives you! There is no one chord that works better than others, just along as you are keeping within the key of your track.

The next thing we can change about our second (response) stab is the tonality of the synth sound itself. This is where changing the oscillators and the filter of the synth come in. 

As you can see here I am using a different waveform for this stab, as well as a different resonance setting on the filter, and as I will show you in a moment, I am automating the filter cutoff differently too, unique to this second stab. So these things in combination make the sound contrast with the first stab.

Below is an image of the filter cutoff automation on this particular stab, repeated over 4 bars.

Similar to the first stab, you can create movement with the filter cutoff using automation, and if you want, you can also further shape the sound using another filter again, like the FilterFreak2. Just remember, all I essentially did for this was duplicate my first stab, and change the oscillator and filter slightly, it’s as simple as that. You keep the foundations of the stab the same, but changing a few things makes it sound completely different.

Don’t forget to send this stab to the reverb and echo return channels, and if you like you can create a new echo for this one with a different time, to get some interesting grooves between the two different echo plugins.

How can we take this even further? I would argue there is room for even more stabs to create a melody and identity. Take a look at the image below, and see how we have fitted one more stab to fill in more gaps in our 2 bar pattern:

This is how our progression sounds now with a third stab (demonstrated over 4 bars but pattern is 2 bars repeated):

As you can hear, this is even better than it was before, the groove sounds more complex. There is more going on for the listener to lock into and crucially the space is being filled better. Call and Response doesn’t have to be just between two sounds, it can be multiple, along as the space in the section permits it, think of it as three people now having a conversation rather than two.

The same process applies to this third stab as before: change the sound, modulate it different, possibly apply different effects. Listen to how this stab has its own sound and modulation:

Through a slower FilterFreak2 LFO speed on the filter cutoffs, we have essentially made every second stab sound like a different sound altogether. This is what that setting looks like on this stab.

Apart from this, this sound is very similar to the first stab, only differing in the oscillator waveform used on Wavetable, but it’s essentially the same core shape as the first one. 

For this stab, we have just used the same chord shape as stab two, but again feel free to use a completely new chord to add more drama to your production.

From this point onwards, you could probably get away with one or two more stabs, and you have to be the judge of what is too much and sounds too busy, it’s important to leave some space for the reverbs and echos to trail off, and these effects themselves fill that otherwise empty space!

Thanks for reading and check out the video tutorial here: https://app.synthohub.com/tutorial/628