# Techno Is Technology: Juan Atkins, From the MS-10 to AI > Techno pioneer Juan Atkins in his own words: turning a mix down, a bassline that carries the melody, the 808 on “Clear,” two drum machines on “No UFOs,” Metroplex and AI. Source: https://spectralplex.com/juan-atkins-techno-is-technology/ Publisher: Spectralplex (spectralplex.com), publishing since 2019 --- Techno pioneer Juan Atkins [died in Mexico City](https://musictech.com/features/juan-atkins-dies-techno-legacy/) on October 31, 2026. He was 64. With Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson he was one of the [Belleville Three](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Belleville_Three), and he gave techno its name. His impact on music puts him at the level of Michael Jackson and Prince. They changed pop. Juan changed time and space with his sound. This piece gathers what he said about making records, from interviews he gave between 1988 and 2025. > “I listen to a track at different levels to see how it comes across, ’cos not everybody’s going to listen to your track pumping out loud.” “You wanna hear how it sounds if it’s in the background; if people are talking and it comes on the radio, **is it interesting enough to make them want to turn it up?**” he told [Music Technology](https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/future-shock/2304) in 1988. He made his records, he said, “in the hope that people will go and buy them to listen to as well as to dance to.” **Play your rough mix quietly while you do something else.** When it catches your attention, notice which part did it. If only the kick comes through, the bass phrase, the voice or whatever your hook is needs a clearer place in the mix. > “Even the drums become secondary to a good bassline.” On “[Interference](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PqnQv2XCf0),” he told Music Technology, he started with the bassline and worked everything else around it. “A lot of times **I let my basslines carry the melody**. You’ll hear that the little tweaks and bits people can listen to are in the bassline.” In 1988 the TB-303 was everywhere, and the interviewer assumed the acid-tinged bassline was one. “That’s the [Pro One](https://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/sequential-circuits-pro-one/4225),” he said. “People want to hear acid, right?” He didn’t want the obvious box: “I didn’t want to sound exactly like everybody else out there.” Synth bass was where it started for him. Of Bernie Worrell’s part on Parliament’s “[Flash Light](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wBqWb43y6I),” he told [Flow State](https://www.flowstate.fm/p/juan-atkins-interview) in 2024: “that was the first time I heard a synth in the bass register.” Listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wBqWb43y6I Solo the bass with the kick. Change the length, accent or filter movement of one note, and see how much of a hook you can get before you add a lead. > “There was different note patterns that I put in, and then when I hit it and the ‘Clear’ bass line came up, I said, ‘OK, yeah, that’s it.’” The bassline on “[Clear](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh9I5k8NeeE)” is the sequencer in a Sequential Pro-One, and the drum machine moved it along. The Pro-One’s rear-panel gate input, a 1982 review noted, “will trigger the Sequencer/Arpeggiator.” As he [told Reverb](https://reverb.com/news/interview-juan-atkins), “you could trigger the sequence from the trigger out from the 808.” So the TR-808 played the beat, and its trigger decided when the bass stepped to its next note. “It’s only four notes actually sequenced,” he told [Sound On Sound](https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/classic-tracks-model-500-no-ufos). He tried about three different note patterns before the one on the record. The rising figure on top was not sequenced. He played it by hand: “I just made a patch and just played it.” Listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh9I5k8NeeE To try it, keep a short note sequence and let a drum lane decide when it advances. In software, a step sequencer that advances on an external trigger does the same thing. Record a few passes, change the trigger pattern each time, and keep the one that makes you stop. > “If it already feels good, why overdo it?” He was talking about producers who fill every track on the tape. “I’ve literally seen guys sit there and ask ‘How many tracks have I got left?’ and try to work out how they can fill them up,” he told Music Technology in 1988. He said much the same to [Jon Savage in 1993](https://ele-mental.org/ele_ment/said&did/cybotron_history.html): “**My music has always been very minimal. If it’s there, it’s there. If it’s doing the job, why dress it up any more?**” > “You can make a pretty good electronic kick sound using gated pink noise.” Before he had a drum machine, Juan made his own drums on his first synth, the monophonic Korg MS-10. White noise gave him hats, cymbals and snares, and pink noise the kick and toms, he told Sound On Sound in 2024. “I would sit for hours on that MS10 just making sounds,” he told [MusicRadar](https://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/interview-juan-atkins-on-the-detroit-techno-sound-532619) in 2012. Put a gate or a short envelope on filtered pink noise and make three versions with different decay times. Play each one against a bassline and keep the one that sits best with it. > “I realised that during each pass you get a generation. So, my very first recordings, by the time I got to the end, man, the drums were so buried in static and muddy sounding.” With two Kenwood cassette decks and a Yamaha four-channel mixer, he recorded a part on one deck, then bounced it to the other while adding the next. He learned to take the bass out early and bring it back pass by pass. “With each pass, you’d just add a little bit more bass, and a little bit more bass, until the last pass, it was like, you can leave it sort of flat and natural,” he told Sound On Sound. If you bounce through tape, a pedal or a saturator, listen to what builds up after two or three passes. Set your EQ for the next bounce as well as the one you’re hearing now. > “When I’d MIDI out of the DrumTraks and MIDI into the 909, it was a perfect sync.” MIDI was new, and the idea behind “[No UFOs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcdOBLH_AXs),” he told Reverb, was linking two drum machines for the first time: a Roland TR-909 and a Sequential DrumTraks. The catch was starting it: “if I started the DrumTraks, the 909 didn’t start automatically,” he told Sound On Sound. “You’d have to make it start,” and “sometimes whether [the patterns] played in sync or not depended on where you started.” Sound On Sound traces the bassline to a Sequential Six-Trak triggered by a Roland MSQ-700, with Pro-One stabs and drones fed through a Lexicon PCM-60, recorded on a Tascam eight-track. “‘No UFOs’ was a total home recording,” he said. Listen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcdOBLH_AXs Run two kits from one clock. Give one the recurring pulse and use the other for answers and accents. Then mute each in turn, and listen to what the one still playing is doing. > “I always feel it’s better to use a drum loop or track that I created rather than somebody else’s.” He didn’t build tracks from other people’s records. With an Akai S900, he told Reverb, “I would sample my own sounds basically, and it was just a way to manipulate further sounds, to add live elements to the sound and mix them with the samples of different things.” Later, his favorite was the E-mu E64. “I could almost use it as a recorder. It was great for doing remixes because you could take a whole vocal track and load it into the sampler, then fly it into your track. That made doing mixes a lot easier,” he told MusicRadar. Presets got the same suspicion. You don’t want to invest in all that gear, he told MusicRadar in 2012, “just to push a couple of preset buttons and make a track that 20 people across the world could have already made.” > “We didn’t use a vocoder... It’s almost like talking through a fan.” The voice on “[Alleys of Your Mind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUt0SqmNCkw)” went through an ADR PanScan, he told Reverb: a panner moving the signal left and right at high speed, with “some kind of short delay” alongside it. Send a spoken line to a fast autopan and a short delay, print it, and check it in mono. If the movement disappears when it’s summed, try amplitude modulation instead. That version keeps the flutter in mono. > “If it’s right, it should be easy. If it’s hard, something’s not right.” He said it about making Borderland with Moritz von Oswald, in a 2013 conversation for [Electronic Beats](https://www.electronicbeats.net/axis-powers-moritz-laurens-von-oswald-talk-to-juan-atkins). They knew what each of them was bringing, “but during the process of recording we couldn’t predict what the result would be.” Laurens von Oswald, who engineered the record, remembered days of the two of them sitting and jamming, and Moritz described long jams that were carefully edited afterward. Listen to “[Electric Garden](https://tresorberlin.bandcamp.com/track/electric-garden-original-mix)” on [*Borderland*](https://tresorberlin.bandcamp.com/album/borderland). While they worked, he said, “We would only listen to the music we just had recorded and what we were working on.” > “I started Metroplex in order to release my sound.” He said that [in 2010](https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2017/05/interview-juan-atkins). Looking back in 2025, he told [Carhartt WIP](https://www.carhartt-wip.com.my/blogs/journal/label-feature-juan-atkins-metroplex): “I started the label to release my first solo record after I left Cybotron, because I had shot my music around, and nobody understood it.” That first record was Model 500’s “No UFOs.” The name came from the same reading as Cybotron’s. In a high school course called Future Studies he read Alvin Toffler’s *Future Shock*, and later *The Third Wave*. “We never tried to apply any of those principles,” he told [Wired](https://www.wired.com/1994/07/techno/) in 1994. “The Third Wave was only inspirational, although we did use hybrid words like ‘cybotron’ and ‘metroplex,’ and Toffler spoke of these futuristic combinations.” In 1993 he gave Jon Savage his definition: “Techno is technological. It’s an attitude to making music that sounds futuristic: something that hasn’t been done before.” He heard it in new machines. The digital hybrids, like the E-mu Morpheus, “had some great sounds,” he told MusicRadar, “really way-out and spacey. Sometimes new machines have sounds that are so unconventional that people are scared to use them.” He kept to it. He brought back the Cybotron name for two EPs on Tresor, [*Maintain The Golden Ratio*](https://mixmag.net/read/juan-atkins-cybotron-28-years-tresor-berlin-maintain-objekt-detroit-techno-news) in 2023 and [*Parallel Shift*](https://tresorberlin.bandcamp.com/album/parallel-shift) in 2024. In that same 2025 interview he was asked what he saw as the next big evolution in techno. “AI, for sure,” he said. He was already experimenting with it: “I’ve done some things that you’ll see coming up on a new Cybotron album called ‘12.’” Asked whether the underground spirit of techno was still alive, he said it was: > “I mean, techno is technology. We’re going forward. There is no way back.” ## The Gear Mentioned **Synths and sound sources** - Korg MS-10: his first synth, and his own drum sounds before he had a drum machine - Sequential Pro-One: the sequenced bassline on “Clear”; the bassline on “Interference”; stabs and drones on “No UFOs” - Sequential Six-Trak: the bassline on “No UFOs” - Akai S900: sampling his own sounds - E-mu E64: his favorite sampler, for remixes - E-mu Morpheus: “really way-out and spacey” **Drum machines** - Roland TR-808: drums and sequence triggering on “Clear” - Roland TR-909 and Sequential DrumTraks: linked over MIDI on “No UFOs” **Sequencers** - Roland MSQ-700: triggering the Six-Trak on “No UFOs” **Effects and recording** - ADR PanScan: the vocal on “Alleys of Your Mind” - Lexicon PCM-60: Pro-One stabs and drones on “No UFOs” - Two Kenwood cassette decks and a Yamaha four-channel mixer: overdubbing, pass by pass - Tascam eight-track: recording “No UFOs”