The Stack

Welcome to The Stack, where UK electronic music heritage meets modern production.

We dig into the sounds, techniques, and stories that shaped house, garage, and techno from warehouse raves to worldwide dancefloors.
Expect deep dives on classic hardware, honest production advice, and cultural context that connects the dots between Chicago's underground and today's global scene.

No fluff, no clickbait, just knowledge from thirty years in the trenches, shared with producers worldwide who value authenticity over algorithms.

Roland Juno-106 synthesiser, the analogue polysynth behind classic house pads and bass

The Juno-106 Was Never the Best Synth in the Room. That Is Exactly Why It Defined House.

The Juno-106 was cheap, a bit noisy, and everywhere. That ubiquity is why its pads and bass carry so much emotional weight in house music, and why the sound still lands today.

Collage of the vintage machines in the Heritage Sounds Bundle: Casio CZ-101, Roland Juno-106 and Korg M1

The Records You Love Were Built on a Handful of Machines. Here They All Are.

Classic house was built on a small set of affordable machines, used everywhere until they became the genre. Here is the whole palette, multi-sampled for Serum 2.

Tech House Essentials preset bank open in Serum 2, showing the preset list with the macro and Flex controls

A Preset Should Be a Finished Sound, Not a Starting Point

A preset's real value is the sound design baked into it: the macro mappings, the effect chains, and the Flex macro. Here is what went into Tech House Essentials.

Why Ableton Live has no VCA groups and the Max for Live device built to add them

VCA Groups in Ableton Live: Why They Don't Exist and What We Built Instead

Pull a group fader in Ableton and the balance shifts. On Pro Tools, Cubase, and Reaper it doesn't, because those DAWs have something Live is still missing. Here's what we found when we tried to bui...

Casio CZ-101 wavetable synthesis and the UK rave organ sound in Serum 2

The Fingerprint of a Sound: What Wavetables Actually Do, and Why It Matters for Rave Production

A wavetable is not a sample. It is the oscilloscope fingerprint of a sound — the blueprint of how a piece of hardware vibrates — captured as a single waveform cycle and transplanted into a modern s...

Rave hits and stabs in classic house and UK garage

Rave Hits and Stabs (And Why You Need Them)

You're four bars into a breakdown and something's not quite right. The pads are doing their thing, bass is rolling along nicely, but there's no... punctuation, you know what I mean? Nothing that ma...