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Designing music for the psychedelic experience
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TimeTraveller
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : Jan 15, 2011 08:00
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On 2011-01-15 04:51, Padmapani wrote:
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On 2011-01-15 04:07, TimeTraveller wrote:
Under influnece everything is psychedelic |
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i must disagree here. there are things that aren't even psychedelic when on drugs. a friend once told me that he found a cheaply designed printed paper inlay of a cd-r that would be 100% normal, while he was tripping his face off with everything else in sight utterly transformed. his fellow trippers agreed that this paper inlay was the most un-psychedelic thing they've ever encountered 
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You can trust me on this - I have expirnece with hallucinogenic substances.For a few years we were like researchers more than anything else.I also never have taken a journey just for fun or sth like this or because it was boring or anything else in that direction.It was always a spiritual ritual or sth holy sacred full of sincerity I would say.
I have expirienced many journeys on territories that have nothing to do with psytrance ,even in absolutely babylonical zones.Each hallucinogenic expirience is a psychedelic one.
It is not logical to me the opposite.Maybe not on an intense trip.
Maybe you like sth more and sth else less but when you on the other side all is different anyhowz.Though all has its senses I believe.Anyhow it getting offtopic here,that just my opinion about it nevertheless.
  https://soundcloud.com/shivagarden |
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freechameleon
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Posted : Jan 15, 2011 11:31
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nowadays for me the real psychedelic experience comes with drones and atmospheric slow music and that goes into my production and what i think makes others trip. it's just a totally different story.
i have been listening and dancing to nearly all subgenres of psychedelic music in all states of minds, loved all the music and had so many psychedelic journeys with it.
but when i stopped to attend parties at a regular basis i discovered that i absolutely can't stand fast fx'n'fills loaded music anymore (listening at home). the highpitched sounds hurt my ears and i can't lean back, relax and let the flow carry me and my dreams. i just feel restless, annoyed and have to change style.
then i stumbled upon some internet radios that transmit drones, beatless dark ambient and stuff. it's soo psychedelic i can't even describe it. i sit there, close my eyes and listen to drones and after a couple of hours i am 'what the fuck, i must have been sitting here for years and my mind travelled to the edge of the universe lived with some extraterrestrial lifeforms and then came back.'
you can't imagine how powerful and trippy one single perfect fx sound can be after 30 min of atmospheres..
since then most of my production time goes into pads, evolving atmospheres, beautiful melodies.
once i loved the tension on the dancefloor, but now i trip from tension and release caused by harmony, melodies that let me fly, and some percussions that push the melody forward, sometimes accompanied by some slow and deep kick and basslines.
i don't think anymore that i need to overload with fx to amaze a crowd on the dancefloor and not how to design a buildup so people shit their pants when the beat drops back in, and not how to make the people sweat and scream.
but i think how to modulate one chord progression that it remains interesting during whole track.
what i want to say is that there is not the one and only psychedelic music, it's different for everyone and every situation.
and with the right substances in the pocket i can go to a folklore festival and trip there to that damn psychedelic music..
but good music goes beyond this. |
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PoM
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Posted : Jan 15, 2011 15:13
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On 2011-01-15 04:07, TimeTraveller wrote:
Psychedelic music is psychedelic even without drugs,if it is not psychedelic without drugs it is not psychedelic at all.
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true but i wonder if it s psychedilc for someone that never used drugs? i don t think.drugs open some gates that will never be closed again,there is a pre/post thing with drugs,imo to really understand psychedlic music this experience is needed.
real psychedlic music is like the path to these gates but for someone that don t have the keys i doubt it s possible to get the experience .
i think lot of psytrance is not psychedelic we discussed it many time already on this board , imo just the synths we use don t sound psychedelic , some vintage analog have a psychedlic vibe to me that you don t get in va , it s also about the music offcourse but with these synths it would be even more psychedelic ,the vintage vibes are way more effective for true psychedlic sound imo,c psychedelic music is born at the time these synths were made and used. |
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dreadieg
IsraTrance Junior Member
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Posted : Jan 15, 2011 17:44
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ya'll realize we sound like a bunch of wine snobs right? i seriously think the psychedelic music thing is personal tastes. to me personally, bass is the most psycedelic thing, not the wompin dubstep shit, but the well put together stream of danceable bassnotes in psytrance.
honestly, i've heard breakcore that is more psycedelic than alot of psytrance, also, i've heard DnB that'll knock me into trance quicker than any progressive i've heard.
listening to the tracks that Mr.Pad posted: these are all great songs, very well put together, very subtle, well written, great pacing, but hardly anymore psychedelic than most of the stuff i hear ya'll put together. |
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aciduss
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Posted : Jan 15, 2011 18:17
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Hey guys, even i like a lot of what has been said here i really started the thread not as a discussion of what is psychedelic or not...
I don't think that is as subjective as some say, for example:
The psy squelch... yes, that peeeeeooowwww ripping sound that has been reproduced thousands of times in many many tracks... that is indeed a psychedelic sound that when on drugs makes chills run through your spine and feel like a gigantic rubbery thing squelching inside your brain.
Now maybe we can turn the thread on to the technical side of this, since this is music production forum... try to answer the question, what do you do to make your music psychedelic or an experience for the audience.
Is it complex atmospheres? squarewave melodies that feel like bouncing balls? Crazy lfo risers? Stereo widen hypnotic leads?
Share what to you aim for when producing true psychedelic trance for the PSYCHEDELIC DRUG experience.
Please don't turn this into a "you don't need drugs to experience psytrance" thread... this is drugs music and yes it can be experienced without but really, when on a powerful blotter trip, life is pretty distinct and music can make a BIG difference if it was crafted with that idea in mind.
So well, thanks for all who have been participating, here, have a lollipop  |
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Trevon
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Posted : Jan 15, 2011 18:30
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303 sounds are trippy 
when you are tripping or enjoying a dj set or live act, there's music that cuts down your mood or completely changes the trip. I'm not talking about dark psychedelic, I'm refering to un-psychedelic crapy sounds... those tracks that people do, just because they do with no emotion or meaning behind 
to me psychedelic means: instant happyness
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Nectarios
Martian Arts
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Posted : Jan 15, 2011 18:53
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+1
The 303 is the acid sound that inspired people to start making music and is basically the reason we are all on here having this conversation, right now.
I find the 303 very psychedelic as a sound, with a bit of delay...I have probably been conditioned to it, from having listened to so many 303 acid riffs since the early '90s.
Peace out.
http://soundcloud.com/martianarts |
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Padmapani
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Posted : Jan 17, 2011 05:11
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+2 for 303
but imo rather the more less distorted fluid acid lines with a lot of slides instead of the heavy acid riffs.
another thing that's often considered psychedelic is moving the cutoff of one synthline (imho works best if it's a gated sound) up while lowering the cutoff of another similar synth by about the same amount at the same time. |
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-=Mandari=-
Mandari
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Posted : Jan 17, 2011 09:01
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ok guys, telling you the secret now...
any truely psychedelic music there is is just cauliflower music....
important is everything, not an engine or a single type of sound. its the pattern, the sound and the modulation that makes a riff or a tune psychedelic.
the only recipe is to build up some nice cauliflower music
FUCK GENRES, LOVE MUSIC!!!!
http://soundcloud.com/mandarimedia
http://banyan-records.com |
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Nomad Moon
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Posted : Jan 17, 2011 13:04
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A funny thing happened to me at this year's Boom Fest., i must say i wasn't on my top shape, been sick the week right before the festival and was even considering not going  but i went, and has soon as i took some acid, the music started to sound all the same for the most acts, the same acidic up and down patterns every 32 bars got me bored, and since then i'm a bit dissapointed at the acidic experience when it comes to the floor, dunno if i'm getting old but i really really enjoyed the chilout experience, something i'm not used to  those percussion lines really make me groove |
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aciduss
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Posted : Jan 17, 2011 17:22
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I believe pitch bending is pretty psychedelic in all its variants. Also voice manipulation and of course atmospheric fx because they transport listener to a sonic ambiance. Percussion i find psychedelic are mostly non acoustic hits, more like altered drums with fx and strange riffs like those of shpongle or in some techno productions.
From a wider perspective i consider a whole typical psytrance to be psychdelic in structure, since it mostly has an introductory beat then rise to a climax and follows in a very similar way than an enlightening experience. Not that i consider every up and down track a psychedelic one but when done well it can provide an effective "roller coaster" feel to the audience while making them dance and feel hypnotic.
One particular act that comes to my mind i've really enjoyed at a party is Loud, pretty classic in some aspects but radical and original in many others, pretty psychedelic and trance inducing.
Acid synths, FM sounds, noize fx, LFO automation, formant filters, legatos, oriental scales, stutter, robot noises, deep atmospheres, running filters...
All this tools, when combined and well used are what is necessary for a psychedelic laboratory to be crafted, of course what makes it possible are the producers ideas, the way he uses them.
Using fx to create tension and then release it in an original way, to revolve all that psychedelia in the trippers mind and blow his head out to cosmos in a super blasting beam of goldrays.
I listen a lot of old stuff to remember some of the early days psychedelic feel which made me fall in love with this sounds, squelchy hypnotic melodic and very focused on giving the dancer an proper trip.
Like the typical example might be Infected Mushroom, i wish they produced more track like Disco Mushroom or Never Ever Land where almost every sound seems designed to trip on it.
Some non psytrance artist that i really enjoy while high and believe have been specially designed for the drgs are Shulman, Younger Brother, Entheogenic u know that chill out line... pretty intensive sound experimentation.
thanks for your words israbuddies. |
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Xamanist
Xamanist
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Posted : Jan 17, 2011 17:27
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On 2011-01-15 04:37, Padmapani wrote:
in my opinion truly psychedelic music needs a certain amount of subtlety. a "BAM! in your face" type of track will sound memorable to sober people and make people on pills go mad on the dancefloor, but will not resonate with people on psychedelics that much. recent fullon has lost it's subtlety completely, replacing it with anthems and formulaic break-build-build-build structures, while most darkpsy has replaced subtlety with a wall of noise/glitch. even a lot of progressive lacks subtlety and features minimalism instead and even some newschool goa replaced it with too many seemingly random melodies.
in addition to that psychedelic music needs a certain complexity in most (but not all) cases and the individual elements to talk to each other or to "form a web" of sound. not being too dark and not being too happy also helps a great deal just like a "mysterious" atmosphere does.
and of course it also needs that special feeling ("immaterial"?, "ethereal"?) that cannot be discribed in words.
i'll give a few examples of what i call highly psychedelic goa-/psytrance. a track says more than 1000 words ( ;-) ) :
Hallucinogen - LSD
Morphem - My Plan
Chi-A.D. - Biocandy
Artha - Mystical Change
FREq - Strange Attractor
Protonica - Hall der Waldgeister
Logic Bomb - Drop Out
Hux Flux - Numbers
MWNN - Space Juice
Cosma - Minimal Vertical
Psykovsky - Lastbus Madrus
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x2, nicely put
Sérgio Xamanist
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soundcloud.com/xamanist |
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Xamanist
Xamanist
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Posted : Jan 17, 2011 17:37
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adding to the discussion, the main thing for me to consider a track psychedelic is inside the mind of the composer... the hability to creat a structure that leads to a final part where all the previous parts combine in pure sintony... surprising me as a listener/dancer and passing the message directly from creator to listener in 1 final round (the "round" concept, where things are building up bit by bit without revealing its final secret has also a lot to do with this).
Older acts did this very well, today you have to search well for the new composers who still can do it
Sérgio Xamanist
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soundcloud.com/xamanist |
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aciduss
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Posted : Jan 17, 2011 17:42
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| surprising me as a listener/dancer and passing the message directly from creator to listener in 1 final round (the "round" concept, where things are building up bit by bit without revealing its final secret has also a lot to do with this). |
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This!
Exactly that, like a magic act where the best is kept for the end and the audience is tricked into the music .
Xamanist which artists in actual psy do you think still do that? Do you do that?
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Nomad Moon
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Posted : Jan 17, 2011 18:09
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Not wanting to get insidde of your discussion the guy that really tickles my brain nowadays has to be Andromeda (Chromosome), dunno how he does what he does but nomatter what act he is playing the man always gets inside my brain and i really fly and fall in love and all the people in the world are wonderfull and i must say i'm not a very exterior typ'of person , probably has to do with the melodies and tension build in the right time |
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