Home › Guides › Melodic Techno Like Massano
Hear it now
Press play.
This is BALIMORE — written, produced and mixed by Steven Ran Cohen. Full tracks, no sign-up, no download. Four minutes is enough to know whether this is your sound.
- Lane
- Hard melodic techno
- Tempo
- 126 – 132 BPM
- Signature
- Distorted bass under clean chords
- Vocals
- Minimal
Two things stated plainly before anything else. This page is not affiliated with the artist it discusses, is not endorsed by them, and sells nothing — no tickets, no merchandise. For shows and tickets, go to that artist’s own official site or their announced ticketing partner and nowhere else. And my information has a cutoff: labels, line-ups and rosters move, so read every name here as a direction to search in rather than a current fact.
Clean on top, saturated underneath
Distortion applied only to the low end. The chords and arpeggios stay clean and wide; the bass and kick are driven hard. That split is the whole trick — it keeps the emotional content legible while making the floor feel physical.
Shorter builds. Thirty-two bars rather than a hundred and twenty-eight. The lane’s patience is traded for impact; at 130 BPM a 32-bar build is just under a minute.
Faster. 126 to 132 rather than 120 to 126. Above roughly 132 the long reverb tails that make the style feel spacious start overlapping, which is the practical ceiling for melodic material.
Drops with a cut. Often a full bar of silence before the downbeat, which reads as louder than any amount of added level.
Where the lane continues
Kevin de Vries, ARTBAT and Agents Of Time for the same weight. Push further and you leave melodic techno for peak-time: Charlotte de Witte and the 140-plus end, where harmony mostly disappears.
What to search instead of the name
Hard melodic techno, melodic techno 130 BPM, peak time melodic techno mix.
And, in the interest of being straight with you
BALIMORE is my own project — I write, produce and mix all of it myself as Steven Ran Cohen. I am not going to claim it belongs beside the name at the top of this page; that artist has spent years in rooms I have not played. What I will say is that it is built in the same lane with the same arrangement logic, the player above is free, and four minutes will tell you more than any comparison I could write.
BALIMORE sets
Continuous 20–80 minute mixes, written, produced and mixed by Steven Ran Cohen.
- Best Hits Psytrance 2027 — The Last Light1:20 · psytrance
- No Borders After Darkafro & latin
- Techno House Best Mix 2026 — Project Xpeak time
- Tech House Mix — Time To Shine Againtech house
- YouTubeplaylist
Questions people actually ask
What genre is Massano?
The hard end of melodic techno — around 126 to 132 BPM, with saturated bass and kick under clean wide chords, shorter builds and drops that cut before landing.
What BPM is hard melodic techno?
Typically 126 to 132. Above roughly 132 the reverb tails of sustained chords begin to overlap and the spaciousness the style relies on disappears.
What artists sound like Massano?
Kevin de Vries, ARTBAT and Agents Of Time sit at similar weight. Harder still and you move into peak-time techno, where melody largely drops out.
How do producers make a drop sound louder?
Usually by taking something away first — a bar of near-silence before the downbeat reads as a far bigger jump than adding level, which a limiter would flatten anyway.