It's great to see a link specifically about Psytrance on Hacker News.
I enjoy trying to understand how Psytrance is made and if that is something you find interesting too checkout @Projector_music on youtube (no affiliation).
I would love to learn about this... Specially in the era of demucs, maybe some python automation to ableton live tracks that we can modify through the day slightly? I have playlist with dozens of 1+ hour videos on YouTube of psytrance and I find them so enjoyable, full of bass and good for focusing (granted there's the obligatory 1 minute muttering in the song of Terrence McKenna but OK, if psilocybin helped them create these amazing songs then so be it )
If you want to literally program music, I can recommend Sonic Pi. The current top comment describes the typical psy bass line in technical terms, which is enough to recreate it in code.
Learn about synthesis. Specifically the relation between the harmonic
structure of the saw and square wave and the properties of a resonant
filter that can pick these harmonics out in various ways. For
psytrance many of the sequences are sparse, have subtle glissando and
slides, in phrygian, hungarian minor and other exotic scales with
canonical forms and contrapuntal rounds often achieved by shifting
subsequences a few steps forward or backward.
Terrific stuff - this is the sort of thing I use without really knowing what it is ("uh dark techno trance mix please YouTube") to get in the zone, so a very useful guide for me - even if the whole million-subgenre-effect feels somewhat like source material for a Monty Python sketch.
I don't know why this is flagged. Texas Faggott perhaps? It the name of an artist.
Soumisaundi - wikipedia[0] "In 1997 Exogenic Records became the first record label to focus on Suomisaundi and approximately during the same time Midiliitto was founded as an association focusing on the advancement of production and commercialisation of Suomisaundi. Pepe Kosminen was the founding Chairman of Midiliitto. Together with Flippin Bixies, Midiliitto counted within its members many of the future international stars of Suomisaundi, including the members of groups like Texas Faggott and Squaremeat."
Hallucinogen is listed under "goa trance", which seems like a reasonable place for it. Shpongle is downtempo, so not really psytrance, despite the goa flavor.
Not all of Shpongle is downtempo. That’s the beauty of Shpongle. One track is like a demo for a theatrical movie score. Pidgeon hole Shpongle at your own demise!
Beatport is the main hub for digging for electronic music. A lot of producers are active on soundcloud and bandcamp. Looking at specific labels in particular is usually pretty good to find similar-but-different music.
i use youtube, it has more music than soundcloud, beatport, spotify, etc.. I could explore it 24/7 and never hear it all, and i have a discogs window open to to research
lol I've been using YT for music for years. it's maybe slightly cumbersome, and a total waste of bandwidth. but i think its the largest catalogue of music available. i only recently stopped using it quite as much once they neutered the search function (all you get is "recommended for you" etc). but i'm happy to see a fellow youtube listener, thought I was the crazy one in my friend group
digging on discogs is great for electronic music imo. check out Telekom Beats TV on youtube - amazing german music channel. Their blind test is amazing. You'll get loads of recommendations. on discogs though if you enter a year range + combo of genres - then just listen to the results - you'll get some great recs imo!
Subgenres in dance music are _extremely_ fluid and change from year to year and even month to month. Some of them are basically just adjective + genre.
The reason dance music has so many sub-genres has to do with how djs mix records. They want to mix songs _smoothly_ and to do that they need songs that sound substantially similar to other songs they want to play. So they find a song or two they like, then they go looking for songs with similar tempos, energy levels, instruments, etc, so they can mix them together. If enough people settle into a particular musical territory, that becomes a "sub-genre", at least for now.
Even something sort of broad like "techno" evolves a lot over time.
I’ve enjoyed listening to psychedelic electronic music while programming since discovering Shpongle twenty years ago. I feel like it helps my brain get into the right mode somehow. I’m not familiar with the definitions of a lot of these sub-taxonomies but interested in listening to them!
I have a coding playlist I’ve put together over the years that is more towards the psybient/chillout end but includes some trance as well, I like the variation in speed and intensity: https://spotify.link/CHSvf399YDb
thanks, my only comment on this topic was going to be "where can I find more like shpongle". Well, I guess the second comment would be "when will somebody make a Generative Shpongle?"
I highly recommend Posford's "The Herb Garden" from Mystery of the Yeti Part 2 (released as a Hallucinogen track before he seemingly switched to doing all of his chiller music with Raja) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Nce44osPpE
Celtic Cross, Ott, and Entheogenic are phenomenal as well.
I'd recommend Third Ear Audio, Carbon Based Lifeforms, Kuba (specifically the album Through a Lens), Phutureprimitive, Saafi Brothers
If you're ever looking to put on a few hours of something and want an epic thematic journey spanning 2 albums, try "When the silence is..." by Koan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBksiW_3dCY
edit: I'm not sure what genre this fits under, but the album "Deliverance" by Culprate reminds me a lot of Shpongle in ways that it has no right to, since... I'm pretty sure it's not psychill/psytrance
Ah man, his early stuff still holds up; but when he started to get into 140 (Dubstep) I just couldn't get into it; I had been in that sound since 2006 and while I appreciate him expanding as an artist, it was just off-putting.
Mark Pritchard on the other hand (1/2 of Global Communication) had a much better go of it and even got a release(s) on Deep Medi for example.
Thanks for the link to Mystery of the Yeti, I hadn't heard that- and it sounds almost exactly like Shpongle (I think even some of the samples are the same).
Shulman is one of my favourites - i wish they still made music. Incredible incredible music - not just for psytrance, just in general. Also recommend Bluetech.
In Search of a Meaningful Moment will remain in my top 10.
I always enjoyed this review from Discogs [0]:
"Just turn off the lights, forget the TV and the computer, close the windows and listen to this album with max volume. Spend some time in a different world created by Shulman. You'll be amazed with the effect this album will have on you, trust me!"
agreed - i installed a very very sizeable car audio system in my car years ago - and Shulman as the review states = an incredible sound world, and most probably missed by most - absolutely sublime in the low end...im talking with a 15 inch, 1500W sub powering the show....just jaw dropping augmentation of reality...without drugs :P
Laugh all you want, when I was like 12 years old my family was into this weird techno-pseudoscience-cult of "Ramtha's school of enlightenment" and they have the biggest trance/shamanistic playlists, we had these long ceremonies of hours of dancing while listening to music like this and drinking red wine and smoking tobacco on pipes. I guess if it wasn't for the alcohol I would have remembered all these amazing songs but well... I think that sect is still alive and I wish they had a playlist somewhere outside their website coz I can't stand the website much due to the religious content bringing back drunk memories. If you know of such a playlist please share
The bad: I was an alcoholic and smoked from age 12 to age 30. The community builds a level of arrogance that they have access to special knowledge because they are in a specific stage in the evolutionary "destiny". Breaking bonds with other family/friends is almost needed because you don't hear their points anymore, just like scientology or other closed sects, not sure their proper name. You think you have a guardian angel too that your destiny is to survive and become enlightened and you shouldn't have fear, I had a couple of near death experiences because of this false sense of security, plus the constant wine drinking...
The good: they pack a lot of trigonometry and algebra but then they teach you "sacred geometry"... They also teach basic quantum mechanics basics, but then teach you that the observer effect is controlled by our minds, or that you can transform a carrot into gold... So somethings are useful...
I'm still recovering from these cults, it's crazy how much our minds can change, therapy takes a while to take and forgetting/re-learning also takes its time, as it should...
Ramtha's School of Enlightenment used to come to a university I used to work at between sessions while the students were away. They would have a section of paddock fenced off and would wander around it blindfolded making "PSSHHTT" noises to stop running into each other (I assume). They definitely seemed like a peculiar bunch.
Even seated you would make these psssshhht sounds of pushing air out, you would end up sweating from a meditation session because your muscles would also be contracted as you focus on the hand position in your chest... In your mind you have to visualize words backwards and breath them out letter by letter... I still laugh at the "so be it" that has to be said with absolute certainty for your wishes to come true
I see a lot of H.U.V.A Network and Carbon Based Lifeforms. I'm mainly a trance lover, but when I get tired of it, these are the two I switch over to and start expanding from.
> I see a lot of H.U.V.A Network and Carbon Based Lifeforms.
This [0] is more psyambient, isn't? I hate typecasting into genres, but I always saw that as the more chill-side of that version of EDM whereas psytrance was more like Alwoods [1], E-Mantra or Capsula etc...
I spent many HDDs streaming SomaFM and got to listen to a ton of it, but there was a notable difference when those tracks drop in not just tempo/BPM and bassline sigs.Cosmic Leaf Records was a really cool label that used to deal in both sounds as their artists had lots of cross-over.
And thanks to this thread I just found out CBL dropped an album this year, going to go deep on that later this week. Still rinsing World of Sleepers after all this time.
Definitely more of psy chill/ambient than trance. I tend to like moving between psytrance and psybient–too many hours of trance alone makes me feel like my brain is vibrating inside my skull!
Divine Moments of Truth is an amazing piece of music that I think could appeal broadly to fans of classical/art music, electronica, EDM, rock, etc. More people should listen to Shpongle.
Thanks for sharing that playlist. Happily a fair few of those come up with the little green heart - a very encouraging sign.
Reviewing the playlist highlighted that Spotify, for some reason, no longer has Smoked Glass and Chrome (Blumenkraft) available, or at least it's not available in AU / for me. The rest of the album remains available, but that track is just spectacularly good.
I bought the album off bandcamp ages ago, so it's only mildly inconvenient, but in turn highlights the annoyance of music brokers like Spotify silently dropping items from their catalogue.
Yeah several of the tracks are unavailable to me in the US. It’s one of my least favorite things about the move towards streaming music generally–the ability to listen to music I love being subject to the whims of business people and lawyers’ disagreements.
I still have a large digital library of “owned” music (the core of this playlist I think dates back to files purchased from the iTunes Music Store the first year it launched in 2003), but the convenience of streaming has gotten me out of the habit of maintaining it.
Once they started singing like Moby, well, whatevs. They laughed all the way to the bank with the explosion in popularity outside the 5000 people globally that knew who they were prior.
Oforia, MFG, Astral Projection, and more fill the void the disinfected mushroom left
They still make ‘classic’ style tracks often enough, but honestly I never started paying much attention to them until they started adding vocals - it really kicked them up to a new level of creativity and value for me. Vicious Delicious was the first time I was like, oh, yeah, this entire album!!!
I don't understand why bands get so much animosity for "leaving their roots". IM make amazing, unique music and put on one hell of a live show. Is it as "pure" psytrance as Astral Projection et al? No but why does it have to be? They make music they like to make.
I don't understand your not understanding. Just because the band changes doesn't mean that the fans have to follow along if they don't like what they've started to produce. Everyone has their likes/dislikes. If someone makes specific reasonings for their tastes not following the new direction doesn't mean they are wrong. You're no better for making your comment than someone stating theirs.
For example, how many people that like Ministry have ever heard their true first album and actually likes it?
It's the intensity of it that strikes me. It's not just a matter of not liking their new stuff. I've encountered many folks that are basically mad the band changed directions. Almost as if the band owes it to the world to keep producing the same sound.
They filled it equally well before IM showed up, if not significantly better; I still enjoy that early Israeli style although it sounds a little cookie-cutter by now. Can't say I vibed with the DarkPsy style & ethos that came in around that time.
IM's work as a whole is all over the place; it doesn't fall cleanly into any single genre. You'd have to narrow it down to individual albums, or even to tracks.
Yup, most important psytrance artist to include. Lots of no name generic artists. Included Ace Ventura which is good, but no Sub6, Skazi, Blastoyz, Infected. Was this just done based on random Spotify searches?
The radio seems to be an afterthought, with their main focus being on their Second Life (yes apparently it still exists) clubs.
Anyhow, from Dj Puddles' YouTube videos ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz1rM6EhFvoqq6WC3f9fSwQ ) it looks like the track is shown in the Second Life's clubs (the videos are often marred by the dj's unbearable distorted voice...).
All in all, there seems to be an incredible effort on the music, the Second Life part and a lot more but the web side is definitely stuck in the 90s, disgracefully...
They probably don't realize what they could be if they looked outside Second Life...
I have never understood why psytrance subgenres are so focused on BPM range. There is so much more to music than the tempo, it has always felt overly reductive to me. I had a friend who was a psytrance producer and even hearing him talk at length about it, I was never convinced that BPM was a critical differentiator. Also respectfully I think categorizing a subgenre as falling within 4 BPM is outrageously too narrow. Many casual listeners cannot even detect such a small change in tempo.
Yeah, but with most genres, you typically don't find them isolated to such small BPM ranges (I see on this guide ranges as low as 2 BPM). Most genres have a much wider range, eg ~10-ish or more BPMs. I really don't think it's accurate to limit these genres to such a small range, when a genre is more about the specific sound and style of a track.
Yeah, I'm not saying all the genres operate the same with BPMs. Compared to most house and techno events I go to, I do feel that psytrance events are a bit more "unrelenting" in bpm where I wish there was more variety.
"Many casual listeners cannot even detect such a small change in tempo."
Maybe not consciously, but their heart can probably (literaly) feel it and react differently, which is what this is mostly about. And in general I totally agree, that there is way more to music than tempo and I am only partially into anything techno as I like more instruments and variations, but with electronic dance music the rhythm simply matters the most for dancing.
Casual listeners can't detect it, but it strongly affects the possibility space for production purposes. For instance, if you're writing happy hardcore music at 170+ BPM with a kick drum on every beat, you will get surprisingly little time between those kicks to work with the bass and other instruments. While this is a somewhat extreme example, even something like the difference between 128 BPM and 138 BPM can change what you're making. A commercial house track produced at 128 BPM may sound like 90s Eurodance when played at 138. Similarly, a deep house track produced at 122 might feel like radio EDM when played at 128.
While you could certainly make psytrance at 150 BPM, it's going to pack a different punch. You'll make different decisions about what works and what doesn't, and then it's going to end up sounding even more different from the rest of the 138 PBM psytrance -- oops, you've shifted genres. Slow it down to 110 and then people aren't dancing to the track quite the same way anymore. Try dancing to the same song at 100 BPM and then at 120 BPM... you'll notice the difference immediately. Tempo isn't everything, but it's much more than just a number.
If you're interested in some BPM fuckery, there's a small-ish contingent of artists/labels doing some cool things around the 80/160-ish BPM range. Folk like Donato Dozzy, Patrick Russell and Forest Drive West have been putting together some great sets that sound like this militant-ish blend of Techno and Drum and Bass and just get really 'out there' in, in my opinion, the best way possible.
There's one moment in a Forest Drive West set (I wish I could remember which one) where he plays the first 45-ish minutes at 160-ish, and then drops down to 125-130 for the last 1hr+ - but he does it in a manner that you never hear DJs do and almost doesn't work. He leaves the ~160BPM track playing, and brings in the 125-ish track over it in a way that creates this really cool syncopated rhythm. It's risky, and there's a reason you usually don't see people do it, but he pulls it off. I have a particular fondness for Jazz music, particularly Jazz musicians who fuck with time in a similar manner, so to hear a DJ pulling off something like that is awesome to me.
But yeah, highly recommend checking out Dozzy's surprise closing set at Terraforma[1] and Patrick Russell's Mostra[2] set.
Edit: The FDW set I'm thinking of is his set from Boom Festival[3].
I think they are touring as VFTL again, I saw them perform the first album here in London at the start of the year and they are back next week with all new material! So there’s hope that they might come back to whatever part of the world you’re in :)
Ah what a pleasure to see Donato Dozzy mentioned on here! One of my favourite DJs/artists. Hearing his Labyrinth 2008 set [1] had a big impact on my musical tastes - I was into techno already, but hadn’t discovered anything so deep and hypnotic.
It actually might appeal to people on here who like psy trance - it’s a different style (hypnotic/deep techno) and tempo but it shares some structural and sonic elements.
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing him play many times and meeting him and he’s just as lovely as you’d hope!
> Tempo isn't everything, but it's much more than just a number.
Does this specifically apply to Psytrance where I think the tempo stays more or less constant for most of the song. In general is there any Psytrance where tempo evolves during the song, goes up and down? I understand it might be difficult to dance to.
In Psytrance, and dance music in general, most BPMs will stay the same throughout the track. You may have moments where the track will cut to half-time and "feel" slower, even though it's kinda not, but more often than not you're going to find that dance music tracks maintain the same BPM throughout.
DJs, however, will often be the ones switching the tempo up during a set, either slowly adjusting it up and down over the course of the night, or switching things up and suddenly bringing in a track at a completely different BPM.
Because DJs don’t want to change the tempo of what they play by too much until it sounds wrong, and most electronic music is produced to be played at clubs
And because the dance styles that match ranges of bpm are so different, audiences find ranges they prefer. Try dancing to 125bpm old berghain tracks and compare with how you’re able to move your body in sync with 155bpm hard groove. It’s a completely different experience. This is dance music.
Some of my favorite dancefloor moments have been hearing a track I love played at a wildly different BPM than I'm used to hearing (whether it's playing a 33 as a 45/vice versa, or using a CDJ to really stretch the tempo). The way the vibe of a track can change completely, and shift your perspective of a piece of music, is always super cool to me.
I caught Rhadoo a few years back and he spent two hours playing this dark, kinda spacey techno that just chugged along real nicely at around 125BPM. I didn't love the tracks, but thought the way that he was blending everything was interesting - I'd recommend seeing him play if you can solely for the master class in mixing that he'll give ya.
At any rate, a little over two hours in, I started to hear a familiar hi-hat. My body knew the track, but I couldn't place it. Then he started fucking with the low-end EQs and you could hear it - Happy Cycling by Boards of Canada (the original, not a remix or an edit or anything), a 100BPM downtempo-ish track, coming into the middle of this dark, chugging techno set at 125BPM. Literally my favorite BoC track and the last thing I'd ever expect to hear in the middle of such a set. It was like he'd built the whole set up to that moment, and it worked so fucking well. I still get chills thinking about it.
> Many casual listeners cannot even detect such a small change in tempo.
I DJ both electronic formats as well as "general pop hits" nights. People may not consciously tell, but you take a well know track, and speed it up 3-5% (which also increases the pitch, unless you enable pitch-time stretch correction), and it injects a noticeable amount of energy into the dancefloor.
It's also just a social/"conformal" thing. Tempo regions serve as a kind of Schelling point for styles and energy levels. So if you have a given sub-style or vibe, you are likely to produce music in that style and speed, so it can readily mix in the same context.
Again, all of these micro-genres listed still fall under the aegis of "psytrance" and djs can and often do mix across boundaries and pitch stuff up/down as a part of their art. It's really about self-association and capturing specific vibes, vs exclusion or genre-policing.
Since the target audience is 'people who dance to the same music from ~midnight to sunrise', the ability to sustain a steady pace over that period matters the same way it would for a marathon runner or similar. I haven't gone racing in a while but goa parties used to have a pretty consistent cycle of warmup for an hour, take off over an hour, full-on for 4-6 urs depending on the time of year, then the sun comes up and it would switch to 'sloa', basically the same musical flavor but coasting down to a walking pace.
I play psy-trance at a range of tempos, from dub stuff at 70-80bpm, through prog stuff around 110-130bpm, to more high energy stuff up at 140-150bpm.
The main reason for sticking to a tempo is because psy-trance, and (good) trance music in general is about the constant pulse. The goal is to put the listener in 'the zone' (a trance even :P), and then give them a bunch of ear candy in the mids and highs to keep their happy little brains occupied.
So for any given set DJs generally pick a tempo and stick to it and deliver a driving, consistent pulse, and everything else is just colouring in on top.
This is a weird setup and way to approach it and anyone involved with the scene in its glory days etc never was classifying things this way. Styles based on description of sounds sure but not bpms. This is some weird engineer take on things.
Hallucinogen/Shpongle/AnyPosford is always top, along with Astral Projection and other household names, but at this time (I’m talking 99-04+, when I was knee deep) there where plenty of efforts by so many people that somehow ended as cds and were sold on psyshop [0]. Some acts got to release two or three records in one year, all full of original songs and an hour+ long.
Around that time, I became aware of 0day mp3 “scene”, and for some reason I became obsessed with getting all my psy/goa from scene releases. My day went back like this: check for weekly new releases on psyshop; monitor mp3 scene releases log dumps leaks on sites like mp3kings and others, and once the record was released, go hang on dc++ psyside, psyhub and other psy hubs and hit the search until someone appeared with the files. Then you could queue the files and idle until it got spread sufficiently or some “connected” user or admin was kind enough to grant you a slot.
My method worked so well that I started getting requests from top users and admins to grant slots to get the latest stuff. I guess xkcd describes it better [1].
Some of the acts that got my attention or i can remember are:
* Blue Planet Corporation
* Phoney Orphans
* Ticon
* Son Kite
* Flying Buddhas
* Penta
* Minilogue
* Shiva Chandra
* Shiva Shidappu
* Astrix
* Vibrasphere
* Green nuns of the revolution
* GMS
* Talamasca
* Total Eclipse
* Astralasia
* Cosma
Interesting that this is on the front page of HN today. Tensions are running high in the psytrance subreddit this week. Psytrance is very popular among Israeli settlers, perhaps because many visit Goa after completing their military service.
The festival in Israel where 250 people were murdered by Palestinians while they were dancing in peace was a Psy Trance festival. One of the greatest Psy Trance bands of all time, Astral Projection, was supposed to play at the festival. You're right that tensions are running high. This was an absolute pogrom on a peace loving community that many people (including myself) have been a part of for 40+ years. Suggesting that "tensions are running high" is the understatement of the year.
> "It happened when Israeli forces engaged in fierce gun battles with Palestinian fighters in Kibbutz Be’eri and fired indiscriminately at both the fighters and their Israeli prisoners."
"terrorists took civilian hostages", has become "fighters took prisoners". That is the wheels of propaganda spinning.
> "...said that prior to that, she and other civilians had been held by the Palestinians for several hours and treated “humanely.” She had fled the nearby “Nova” rave"
Well sure, all I'd be talking about is the nice treatment of my captors too, who just slaughtered 250 of my fellow ravers. They offered tea and cake it was nice.
This is the second such guide to ambient-vicinity I've seen here today. But big names. Boards of Canada. Tycho. Casino vs Japan. Amboy. Brian Eno... I do not see them in their lists. Where do they come in?
Man this takes me back to Goa in the 90s. It was just about the only place that would book Russian DJs, so it was the only place where reel-to-reel DJing was better known than vinyl. It's amazing to see what people have done with the style in the intervening decades, but for me nothing beats the old tunes from the beach parties.
Something not said explicitly but to me, is the characteristic sound of psy-x is the synth bass line. It's a very simple sound that you can make in any subtractive synth - you start with a single saw, add a lowpass filter, and instead of using the amplitude envelope to control the dynamics or "pluck" of the sound you modulate the cutoff of the filter by an envelope with a very short attack, quick decay, and low or zero sustain.
If you're fancy you can use a stepper or lfo sync'd to 16th notes to do the same thing instead of programming loops of 16th notes.
And of course, you sidechain compress that with the kick to get the pumping sound.
That's how you get the deep vibe of a psy track that resonates in the club at 2am.
That's just the basics. The really good tracks find ways to make it crazy, like modulating the decay of the filter envelope with velocity of the notes and then adding velocity curves to create dynamics with the baseline, or adding a reverb send and automating the send level as you build up to the end of a phrase. Or taking the basic idea (a plucky bass with sixteenth notes) and changing how the pluck is defined via an FM synth, or overdrive, or frequency shift, and so on. It's such a simple sound that can be driven to weird places.
It's called (I think) sound design. Changing parameters of a sound wave like filters, resonance, envelope, cutoff, etc, you can achieve desired sounds (you can do that using a real synthesizer or a virtual one). In this case they're explaining how to make a bass sound (which is in the lower frequency of the spectrum)
I am an absolute peon relative to most commenters on HN. Perusing this site feeds both my curiosity and my feelings of inadequacy. But this is one of those rare moments when I actually fully understand what the parent comment is describing. I don’t even produce music myself… I’m more of a fanboy, if anything.
Just a heads up that your comment is flagged. You can definitely joke about things, but HN asks that comments be substantive. Yours was not. I realize the irony writing this comment, but hopefully a bit of community heads up can preserve HN's characteristics for a little while longer.
You can write more than one sentence...? How about an actual take on the topic, and then a joke? Or vice versa! Perhaps a question to ask for more clarity? The possibilities are endless beyond a "lol true" type comment.
Meta: IMO, it was fine. The digression provided an opportunity for me to produce a substantive comment that requires a little less background to understand than duped's excellent explanation.
It's great that you found an opportunity to teach thanks a low-value comment. HN policies still state that comments need to be substantive. There are good reasons for this that should be respected given that we all take advantage of the community built on those clearly stated expectations.
Expressing that you have no idea what the other person is saying (but that this is part of the value of this community) is not without substance or useless. They could have been more verbose about it, but I'm not sure that makes the community better.
The guidelines are guidelines. We all work to interpret them. HN themselves in introducing the guidelines says that "empty" comments can be okay if they're positive, which I feel this was.
Fair points, and I'd appreciate a source on your last statement from the HN guideline side. I just reviewed them to take into account more nuance that may have been added since the last time I checked. I will disagree with your interpretation of substance but defer to the guidelines.
> The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience. Whereas comments like "lol" or "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard" teach us nothing.
> Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.
A sawtooth is a wave that looks like the blade of a saw. It is pretty close to sinusoidal, so it sounds somewhat like a single tone, but there is some distortion and harmonics; not nearly as much as you'd get from a square wave, though.
A synthesizer has an envelope generator, to model how real instruments increase in volume, keep a steady volume while active, and then decay. The envelope is usually multiplied by the underlying waveform, like a sawtooth, to give it these characteristics.
If you have a musical keyboard, pressing a key chooses the frequency of the sawtooth, and the moment that the key is pressed and released trigger the envelope generator and choose its shape.
For the psytrace bass line-- instead of the envelope generator being multiplied by the signal (and controlling its amplitude directly), instead it is used to sweep a filter. How much of the distortion and harmonics you hear from the sawtooth changes over the course of the note and gives the bassline its distinctive sound.
"A sawtooth is a wave that looks like the blade of a saw. It is pretty close to sinusoidal, so it sounds somewhat like a single tone, but there is some distortion and harmonics; not nearly as much as you'd get from a square wave, though."
In Fourier terms, a sinusoidal is the fundamental frequency.
A square wave contains the fundamental frequency + all odd harmonics.
A saw wave contains the fundamental frequency + all odd and even harmonics.
No distortion is needed to shape a saw wave and the rest of what you said is inaccurate.
It is distorted in the sense that a sine wave that has been put through a nonlinear process -- e.g. clipped to form a square wave; clipped and integrated to form a triangle; clipped and integrated asymmetrically to form a saw; etc.
Total harmonic distortion measures the amount of power that you have in harmonics vs. the fundamental wave. A purely sinusoidal tone would have no energy in harmonics; a saw would have 44% of its energy in harmonics.
Maybe you're nitpicking and saying that it's not "distortion", but harmonic distortion as a metric of how much energy is in harmonics-- because the primary way we used to get those harmonics is by distortion of a sine wave-- is common lingo.
Maybe I was nitpicking about the use of the term "distortion" (I prefer "transformation"), but I did want to clarify that saw waves are more harmonically rich and complex than square waves.
This is a cool resource, Ableton being quite respected and all, but I'm interested in making synths with analog electronics if you have any suggestions in that area. Look Mum No Computer and Music From Outerspace are both fantastic for that, but I'm always open to what other folks are doing in the analog space.
As much as I would love to have a huge modular rack in my house, I am happy with a blend of physical and digital stuff. My first purchase was an Arturia Microbrute, which is just excellent for learning basic, monophonic synthesis. It's a knob-per-function device so there's nothing better than just twisting knobs and stumbling onto an amazing sound.
I send that through a cheap echo-delay pedal, then a reverb pedal, so I have a lot of control over the dynamics of whatever sound I'm making. I tend to use the Brute for basslines but it's super versatile.
From there, it depends on what I'm trying to make or play with, but I've had a great time using the Brute as both sound and MIDI input to get some nice layered input. VSTs are totally preferential of course, but I have the Arturia Jupiter 8 VST for when I want to get REALLY deep into analog synths without spending $25k on a working physical model.
Otherwise, I also have an Arturia Beatstep Pro (I'm an Arturia fanboi for sure, but their stuff is affordable and fun) which I can control the Brute with via CV in case I want to have it play a loop while I twist some knobs. I also have a profile set up in Ableton that allows me to use all the Beatstep Pro knobs to control various knobs/sliders on the Jupiter 8 VST, which has opened me up for a lot of possibilities. Beyond that, the Brute has a "mod panel" which allows for some fun stuff like jumping the LFO to the sub bass knob - the Brute is monophonic but has an overtone generator you can tune anywhere from -8 to +5.
It sounds like modular or custom synthesis are what you are looking for, but for my level of skill/time/hobby it's nice to have a setup that can fit entirely on an old Yamaha keyboard :)
I knew this was gonna get downvoted and I always do the same for these kind of posts. In this one however, I think the poster put words on a sensation shared by most of us who read the brilliant parent
Basic song writing is a good place to start (and should cover the dynamics/loudness of notes and sounds as per the parent post to introduce groove). Then combine with sound engineering.
There is a lot of resources all over the web, and tutors and courses that you can do.
There’s a few ways to skin a cat. The more I research, the less popular side-chaining seems in general. What’s more common is side-chaining with ghost notes or manually ducking by drawing envelopes in automation lanes.
These days in my experience most people don't use a sidechain signal, just chop out, or filter, enough of the first base note so that it doesn't clash with the kick. People still refer to it as "sidechain" just because historically that's what it was. Most popular plugin to achieve this is LFOTool but also Shaperbox is used now too which is nice as it lets you cut in frequency ranges in different amounts. Its all about making it gel with the kick. You want your bass to be powerful but in the modern sound you always want the kick to win.
Yes phase alignment is important too. There's always a sweet spot where it just sounds "right". Plus staring endlessly at an oscilloscope to check they aren't interfering. Then doing it for hours and hours and wondering at the end if it sounded better before you started mucking around with it actually but your ears are so tired of it you can't tell anymore.
This stuff is such a rabbit hole. Lots of fun though.
Also perhaps not explicitly stated but in these genres the bass line is a drone. There's no melody in the bass line. This is similar to instruments like the sitar. It creates add harmonics and basically gives it the psychedelic sound.
It was psytrance (Infected Mushroom) that led to the purchase of my first synth. I’m no longer big on psytrance, but it has a special place in my heart.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadI enjoy trying to understand how Psytrance is made and if that is something you find interesting too checkout @Projector_music on youtube (no affiliation).
Psytrance Guide https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20693904 (August 14, 2019 — 465 points, 210 comments)
Suomisaundi psytrance is carzy.
Soumisaundi - wikipedia[0] "In 1997 Exogenic Records became the first record label to focus on Suomisaundi and approximately during the same time Midiliitto was founded as an association focusing on the advancement of production and commercialisation of Suomisaundi. Pepe Kosminen was the founding Chairman of Midiliitto. Together with Flippin Bixies, Midiliitto counted within its members many of the future international stars of Suomisaundi, including the members of groups like Texas Faggott and Squaremeat."
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suomisaundi
As an old Simon Posford (shpongle etc) fan boy … can anyone explain why exactly I’m not seeing his projects here? Too old, wrong genre?
BPM, example songs, where to find more, lineage
This site is awesome.
https://everynoise.com/engenremap.html
The understanding of the author on each subgenre is surprisingly different from mine.
The reason dance music has so many sub-genres has to do with how djs mix records. They want to mix songs _smoothly_ and to do that they need songs that sound substantially similar to other songs they want to play. So they find a song or two they like, then they go looking for songs with similar tempos, energy levels, instruments, etc, so they can mix them together. If enough people settle into a particular musical territory, that becomes a "sub-genre", at least for now.
Even something sort of broad like "techno" evolves a lot over time.
I have a coding playlist I’ve put together over the years that is more towards the psybient/chillout end but includes some trance as well, I like the variation in speed and intensity: https://spotify.link/CHSvf399YDb
https://www.music-map.com/shpongle
If Simon Posford is involved, give it a listen. Much better than some “AI” generative model
Celtic Cross, Ott, and Entheogenic are phenomenal as well.
I'd recommend Third Ear Audio, Carbon Based Lifeforms, Kuba (specifically the album Through a Lens), Phutureprimitive, Saafi Brothers
If you're ever looking to put on a few hours of something and want an epic thematic journey spanning 2 albums, try "When the silence is..." by Koan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBksiW_3dCY
edit: I'm not sure what genre this fits under, but the album "Deliverance" by Culprate reminds me a lot of Shpongle in ways that it has no right to, since... I'm pretty sure it's not psychill/psytrance
Ah man, his early stuff still holds up; but when he started to get into 140 (Dubstep) I just couldn't get into it; I had been in that sound since 2006 and while I appreciate him expanding as an artist, it was just off-putting.
Mark Pritchard on the other hand (1/2 of Global Communication) had a much better go of it and even got a release(s) on Deep Medi for example.
I always enjoyed this review from Discogs [0]:
"Just turn off the lights, forget the TV and the computer, close the windows and listen to this album with max volume. Spend some time in a different world created by Shulman. You'll be amazed with the effect this album will have on you, trust me!"
Wherever you are Yaniv, I hope you're well.
[0] https://www.discogs.com/Shulman-In-Search-Of-A-Meaningful-Mo...
his first solo album under his own name, Even Tundra, is incredible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljzFWdax0iE&list=PL44Q4mKIiC...
I once saw Simon in a massive rave as Hallucinogen from 4am to 8am and Shpongle from 12pm to 3pm. Those Gamma Goblins still travel trough my spine.
This [0] is more psyambient, isn't? I hate typecasting into genres, but I always saw that as the more chill-side of that version of EDM whereas psytrance was more like Alwoods [1], E-Mantra or Capsula etc...
I spent many HDDs streaming SomaFM and got to listen to a ton of it, but there was a notable difference when those tracks drop in not just tempo/BPM and bassline sigs.Cosmic Leaf Records was a really cool label that used to deal in both sounds as their artists had lots of cross-over.
And thanks to this thread I just found out CBL dropped an album this year, going to go deep on that later this week. Still rinsing World of Sleepers after all this time.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly4KqXUE0F4 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMy1pB4NG10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLLzz4vxKb0
Hallucinogen In Dub (remixed by Ott) is another gorgeous album. Ott has a bunch of his own albums too.
Reviewing the playlist highlighted that Spotify, for some reason, no longer has Smoked Glass and Chrome (Blumenkraft) available, or at least it's not available in AU / for me. The rest of the album remains available, but that track is just spectacularly good.
I bought the album off bandcamp ages ago, so it's only mildly inconvenient, but in turn highlights the annoyance of music brokers like Spotify silently dropping items from their catalogue.
I still have a large digital library of “owned” music (the core of this playlist I think dates back to files purchased from the iTunes Music Store the first year it launched in 2003), but the convenience of streaming has gotten me out of the habit of maintaining it.
Easily Embarrassed is a band worth checking out. Same with Vibrasphere.
If anybody here is in the Seattle area and wants to check out a show or jam, please email me!
He's playing in Denver for 2 shows on Halloween weekend btw! I'd catch him since he's technically "retired"
https://everynoise.com/
Oforia, MFG, Astral Projection, and more fill the void the disinfected mushroom left
For example, how many people that like Ministry have ever heard their true first album and actually likes it?
U2, Radiohead, Kate Nash, Metallica, Coldplay have also dramatically changed musical direction and lost/gained fans in the process.
Is also fun to see a large library of the samples found in psytrance, but lots of other stuff on the site as well
I've rarely seen more than ten contemporary listeners and I don't remember how I ran into it myself, but it's the best psytrance thing I'm aware of.
There are various djs though, not all equally good, so maybe check at different times (dj puddles is to a large degree a guarantee).
* yes no tls : - (
The radio seems to be an afterthought, with their main focus being on their Second Life (yes apparently it still exists) clubs.
Anyhow, from Dj Puddles' YouTube videos ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz1rM6EhFvoqq6WC3f9fSwQ ) it looks like the track is shown in the Second Life's clubs (the videos are often marred by the dj's unbearable distorted voice...).
Furthermore, many of the mixes are published on mixcloud (https://www.mixcloud.com/DJBabeBPM , https://www.mixcloud.com/DJ_Gadget ), but you need to have a subscription to see the trackslist?? :facepalm:
All in all, there seems to be an incredible effort on the music, the Second Life part and a lot more but the web side is definitely stuck in the 90s, disgracefully...
They probably don't realize what they could be if they looked outside Second Life...
Source: DJ for ~25 years.
Maybe not consciously, but their heart can probably (literaly) feel it and react differently, which is what this is mostly about. And in general I totally agree, that there is way more to music than tempo and I am only partially into anything techno as I like more instruments and variations, but with electronic dance music the rhythm simply matters the most for dancing.
While you could certainly make psytrance at 150 BPM, it's going to pack a different punch. You'll make different decisions about what works and what doesn't, and then it's going to end up sounding even more different from the rest of the 138 PBM psytrance -- oops, you've shifted genres. Slow it down to 110 and then people aren't dancing to the track quite the same way anymore. Try dancing to the same song at 100 BPM and then at 120 BPM... you'll notice the difference immediately. Tempo isn't everything, but it's much more than just a number.
There's one moment in a Forest Drive West set (I wish I could remember which one) where he plays the first 45-ish minutes at 160-ish, and then drops down to 125-130 for the last 1hr+ - but he does it in a manner that you never hear DJs do and almost doesn't work. He leaves the ~160BPM track playing, and brings in the 125-ish track over it in a way that creates this really cool syncopated rhythm. It's risky, and there's a reason you usually don't see people do it, but he pulls it off. I have a particular fondness for Jazz music, particularly Jazz musicians who fuck with time in a similar manner, so to hear a DJ pulling off something like that is awesome to me.
But yeah, highly recommend checking out Dozzy's surprise closing set at Terraforma[1] and Patrick Russell's Mostra[2] set.
Edit: The FDW set I'm thinking of is his set from Boom Festival[3].
[1]https://soundcloud.com/donato-dozzy/donato-dozzy-terraforma-...
[2]https://soundcloud.com/monument-podcast/mnmt-recordings-patr...
[3]https://soundcloud.com/boomfestival/forestdrivewest-the-gard...
Such a delight seeing psytrance and donato dozzy and dub techno pop up on HN.
It actually might appeal to people on here who like psy trance - it’s a different style (hypnotic/deep techno) and tempo but it shares some structural and sonic elements.
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing him play many times and meeting him and he’s just as lovely as you’d hope!
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nGIUCQ8KW9Y or https://m.soundcloud.com/paul-wuerdig/sets/donato-dozzy-laby...
Does this specifically apply to Psytrance where I think the tempo stays more or less constant for most of the song. In general is there any Psytrance where tempo evolves during the song, goes up and down? I understand it might be difficult to dance to.
DJs, however, will often be the ones switching the tempo up during a set, either slowly adjusting it up and down over the course of the night, or switching things up and suddenly bringing in a track at a completely different BPM.
And because the dance styles that match ranges of bpm are so different, audiences find ranges they prefer. Try dancing to 125bpm old berghain tracks and compare with how you’re able to move your body in sync with 155bpm hard groove. It’s a completely different experience. This is dance music.
I caught Rhadoo a few years back and he spent two hours playing this dark, kinda spacey techno that just chugged along real nicely at around 125BPM. I didn't love the tracks, but thought the way that he was blending everything was interesting - I'd recommend seeing him play if you can solely for the master class in mixing that he'll give ya.
At any rate, a little over two hours in, I started to hear a familiar hi-hat. My body knew the track, but I couldn't place it. Then he started fucking with the low-end EQs and you could hear it - Happy Cycling by Boards of Canada (the original, not a remix or an edit or anything), a 100BPM downtempo-ish track, coming into the middle of this dark, chugging techno set at 125BPM. Literally my favorite BoC track and the last thing I'd ever expect to hear in the middle of such a set. It was like he'd built the whole set up to that moment, and it worked so fucking well. I still get chills thinking about it.
Man, this thread has me waxing poetic haha...
I DJ both electronic formats as well as "general pop hits" nights. People may not consciously tell, but you take a well know track, and speed it up 3-5% (which also increases the pitch, unless you enable pitch-time stretch correction), and it injects a noticeable amount of energy into the dancefloor.
It's also just a social/"conformal" thing. Tempo regions serve as a kind of Schelling point for styles and energy levels. So if you have a given sub-style or vibe, you are likely to produce music in that style and speed, so it can readily mix in the same context.
Again, all of these micro-genres listed still fall under the aegis of "psytrance" and djs can and often do mix across boundaries and pitch stuff up/down as a part of their art. It's really about self-association and capturing specific vibes, vs exclusion or genre-policing.
Since the target audience is 'people who dance to the same music from ~midnight to sunrise', the ability to sustain a steady pace over that period matters the same way it would for a marathon runner or similar. I haven't gone racing in a while but goa parties used to have a pretty consistent cycle of warmup for an hour, take off over an hour, full-on for 4-6 urs depending on the time of year, then the sun comes up and it would switch to 'sloa', basically the same musical flavor but coasting down to a walking pace.
The main reason for sticking to a tempo is because psy-trance, and (good) trance music in general is about the constant pulse. The goal is to put the listener in 'the zone' (a trance even :P), and then give them a bunch of ear candy in the mids and highs to keep their happy little brains occupied.
So for any given set DJs generally pick a tempo and stick to it and deliver a driving, consistent pulse, and everything else is just colouring in on top.
This is a weird setup and way to approach it and anyone involved with the scene in its glory days etc never was classifying things this way. Styles based on description of sounds sure but not bpms. This is some weird engineer take on things.
It used to be my catalog for 0day psy mp3 to hunt in dc++ channels, where I used to hang for days, waiting for a slot to open.
I think I still have some of those releases, and I sure was able to get a good chunk of Psytopia catalog.
Dimension 5, Astral Projection, Infected Mushroom, Analog Pussy, Blue Planet Corporation, Mistery of the Yeti, Shiva Chandra…
I miss my Spirit Zone Records shirt.
Surprised no Shpongle on the lists
Around that time, I became aware of 0day mp3 “scene”, and for some reason I became obsessed with getting all my psy/goa from scene releases. My day went back like this: check for weekly new releases on psyshop; monitor mp3 scene releases log dumps leaks on sites like mp3kings and others, and once the record was released, go hang on dc++ psyside, psyhub and other psy hubs and hit the search until someone appeared with the files. Then you could queue the files and idle until it got spread sufficiently or some “connected” user or admin was kind enough to grant you a slot.
My method worked so well that I started getting requests from top users and admins to grant slots to get the latest stuff. I guess xkcd describes it better [1].
Some of the acts that got my attention or i can remember are:
* Blue Planet Corporation * Phoney Orphans * Ticon * Son Kite * Flying Buddhas * Penta * Minilogue * Shiva Chandra * Shiva Shidappu * Astrix * Vibrasphere * Green nuns of the revolution * GMS * Talamasca * Total Eclipse * Astralasia * Cosma
…and I could keep goin.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200929135452/https://www.psysh...
[1] https://xkcd.com/1095/
> "It happened when Israeli forces engaged in fierce gun battles with Palestinian fighters in Kibbutz Be’eri and fired indiscriminately at both the fighters and their Israeli prisoners."
"terrorists took civilian hostages", has become "fighters took prisoners". That is the wheels of propaganda spinning.
> "...said that prior to that, she and other civilians had been held by the Palestinians for several hours and treated “humanely.” She had fled the nearby “Nova” rave"
Well sure, all I'd be talking about is the nice treatment of my captors too, who just slaughtered 250 of my fellow ravers. They offered tea and cake it was nice.
The artists you listed are more electronic, so down tempo, shoegaze, electronic.
If you're fancy you can use a stepper or lfo sync'd to 16th notes to do the same thing instead of programming loops of 16th notes.
And of course, you sidechain compress that with the kick to get the pumping sound.
That's how you get the deep vibe of a psy track that resonates in the club at 2am.
That's just the basics. The really good tracks find ways to make it crazy, like modulating the decay of the filter envelope with velocity of the notes and then adding velocity curves to create dynamics with the baseline, or adding a reverb send and automating the send level as you build up to the end of a phrase. Or taking the basic idea (a plucky bass with sixteenth notes) and changing how the pluck is defined via an FM synth, or overdrive, or frequency shift, and so on. It's such a simple sound that can be driven to weird places.
It's this sort of stuff that makes it so good. Nothing like eavesdropping on a highly technical conversation in an esoteric field. Love it.
The guidelines are guidelines. We all work to interpret them. HN themselves in introducing the guidelines says that "empty" comments can be okay if they're positive, which I feel this was.
> The test for substance is a lot like it is for links. Does your comment teach us anything? There are two ways to do that: by pointing out some consideration that hadn't previously been mentioned, and by giving more information about the topic, perhaps from personal experience. Whereas comments like "lol" or "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard" teach us nothing.
> Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.
The statement dates to 2014.
A sawtooth is a wave that looks like the blade of a saw. It is pretty close to sinusoidal, so it sounds somewhat like a single tone, but there is some distortion and harmonics; not nearly as much as you'd get from a square wave, though.
A synthesizer has an envelope generator, to model how real instruments increase in volume, keep a steady volume while active, and then decay. The envelope is usually multiplied by the underlying waveform, like a sawtooth, to give it these characteristics.
If you have a musical keyboard, pressing a key chooses the frequency of the sawtooth, and the moment that the key is pressed and released trigger the envelope generator and choose its shape.
For the psytrace bass line-- instead of the envelope generator being multiplied by the signal (and controlling its amplitude directly), instead it is used to sweep a filter. How much of the distortion and harmonics you hear from the sawtooth changes over the course of the note and gives the bassline its distinctive sound.
In Fourier terms, a sinusoidal is the fundamental frequency. A square wave contains the fundamental frequency + all odd harmonics. A saw wave contains the fundamental frequency + all odd and even harmonics.
No distortion is needed to shape a saw wave and the rest of what you said is inaccurate.
Total harmonic distortion measures the amount of power that you have in harmonics vs. the fundamental wave. A purely sinusoidal tone would have no energy in harmonics; a saw would have 44% of its energy in harmonics.
Maybe you're nitpicking and saying that it's not "distortion", but harmonic distortion as a metric of how much energy is in harmonics-- because the primary way we used to get those harmonics is by distortion of a sine wave-- is common lingo.
The fact that you have second harmonics is what makes saws so useful as a basis function for synthesis.
EDIT: just noticed the analog there, I don't know anything about that.
I send that through a cheap echo-delay pedal, then a reverb pedal, so I have a lot of control over the dynamics of whatever sound I'm making. I tend to use the Brute for basslines but it's super versatile.
From there, it depends on what I'm trying to make or play with, but I've had a great time using the Brute as both sound and MIDI input to get some nice layered input. VSTs are totally preferential of course, but I have the Arturia Jupiter 8 VST for when I want to get REALLY deep into analog synths without spending $25k on a working physical model.
Otherwise, I also have an Arturia Beatstep Pro (I'm an Arturia fanboi for sure, but their stuff is affordable and fun) which I can control the Brute with via CV in case I want to have it play a loop while I twist some knobs. I also have a profile set up in Ableton that allows me to use all the Beatstep Pro knobs to control various knobs/sliders on the Jupiter 8 VST, which has opened me up for a lot of possibilities. Beyond that, the Brute has a "mod panel" which allows for some fun stuff like jumping the LFO to the sub bass knob - the Brute is monophonic but has an overtone generator you can tune anywhere from -8 to +5.
It sounds like modular or custom synthesis are what you are looking for, but for my level of skill/time/hobby it's nice to have a setup that can fit entirely on an old Yamaha keyboard :)
so with 16ths, you'd typically see 1/16 & 2/16 have zero to little amplitude, 3/16 & 4/16 have most of the energy. 4 maybe even a little less so.
which can't be done by sidechaining. also phase alignment with the kick is important
There is a lot of resources all over the web, and tutors and courses that you can do.
If you want to start off with an easy introduction then maybe Oscar @ Underdog can help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAJz4-YZdio&t=8s
If you want to product Psytrance - then you are lucky because IMHO it's perhaps the easiest most formulaic genre.
Yes phase alignment is important too. There's always a sweet spot where it just sounds "right". Plus staring endlessly at an oscilloscope to check they aren't interfering. Then doing it for hours and hours and wondering at the end if it sounded better before you started mucking around with it actually but your ears are so tired of it you can't tell anymore.
This stuff is such a rabbit hole. Lots of fun though.
Seriously, interesting discussion. I think I'll stick with physical instruments!