Padmapani

depends on how often i'm listening to music. normally i'm happy with my monthlong playlist on random, but when the time i can spend listening to music is limited (for instance when travelling), i stick to my tried and true list of ca. 200 favourites.

if structure has to be balanced with freedom to exist, then fuck structure.

nice favourites list. i'd say you have a good taste in music if you had not included logic bomb at the other end of the spectrum ;) what's blatantly missing in your collection is etnoscope. for goa trance i think you'd also like aeternum/ominus/encens. good progressive artists that'd fit in with the rest are protonica and soul kontakt. also don't forget to check out ticon's latest album; it's different than his usual stuff. maybe also robert elster; his album is not purely psy but crossing the borders between progressive and minimalistic acid trance, but since he is half of vibrasphere it's still excellent music.

imho it's rather a year of quantity. besides those mentioned above we have skizologic and goa tree. if you also look beyond goa we have releases by martian arts, ovnimoon, protonica, braincell, tron, daniel lesden, e-clip, lunarave, chameleon; plus ajja, alwoods, dubsalon, gmo vs. dense, profondita, astral waves and saafi brothers on the downtempo side. the sheer quantity makes up for the lack of any truly outstanding albums.

it's been an above average year for me. there are plenty of ok or interesting releases, even though 2017 is lacking spectacular albums such as earthcall, dream telepathy or read more from 2016. many things are only discovered later, others need some time to grow so i don't see any reason to complain about 2017 just yet.

neither microhouse nor trap are new. what used to be called microhouse in the 90s is now part of "minimal techno" (i'll never get tired of mentioning that it still sounds like house). trap used to be called crunk in the 90s. it's just rebranding - like with chicago hard house being renamed as jumpstyle

there are quite a few of us

exactly. same thing for mixes without tracklist (with few exceptions).

i'm listening to a dj set at home right now. a good dj set tells a story and puts tracks you wouldn't usually listen to into a context that makes them shine. ideally you also discover new artists/albums in mixtapes. so i see no reason not to listen to them at home.

i wouldn't change it too much either. your track is melodic enough not to depend too much on overly fat bass. it's funny you choose e-clip as example of good bass balance. i use e-clip's most recent album as reference for too much bass, but i guess e-clip changed his mixing style in the years in between. i rather take logic bomb's the grid as example for nicely balanced kick/bass.

good if you're comparing it to melodic fullon. ok if you're comparing it to modern progressive that focuses more on bass sound rather than melody. to compete with them you could use a little more low end and a more cohesive sound. right now there seems to be a sort of hole between the layers. maybe not cutting the low mids that agressively would fix this? maybe putting all bass layers though some distortion together? i find that just dropping the whole thing a few semitones also makes the bass sound more fat and "modern". this is good on festival rigs but makes important sounds disappear on smaller systems...

i was lucky. when i came halfway through blastoyz set they had apparently decided tha,t since the "big names" had already played, most of the party was already over so they didn't ask for money anymore. it is. kinda reminds me of eskimo back ten years ago. it's also somehow how dutch trance consisted of mainly breaks and builds before the bubble popped and no one was interested in the genre anymore. iirc ilsa gold once did something similar at a big festival. they only played the builds of different well known tracks of techno/trance/... history and switched to a different track every time before the climax. i guess they had similar views as we have now

i don't know. i thought that it seeks to maximise the opportunities for the crowd cheering (as in "give us the beat now"), but the crowd wasn't impressed at all.

so i've been to this event the past weekend. tristan was good (even though the sound system emphasised the bass so much that everything else was in the background or even inaudible) and blastoyz (at least the second half of his set) was as expected. what i have noticed is that what serves as buildup to a climax in a tristan track is the "drop" in "futureprog" tracks. this explains why even the parts of a track with beat aren't at all suited for dancing for someone used to other kinds of psytrance. in tristan's music a break often leads to a short groovy bass/kick pattern which leads to a climax with the hits and some psychedelic percussion coming in. they are accompanied by a steady regular kick/bass pattern which keeps you dancing for the coming few minutes. for blastoyz on the other hand a break is followed by a goovy bass/kick pattern (most often lacking any melody and even hats) which is then followed by another break. it's intensely frustrating. the best part of his set was the melody of prodigy's voodoo people and even that was painfully slowed down.

skipping through the album on youtube, three quarters of the album sounds as if it's the same pads all over again. no matter if you listen at minute 14, 34, 53 or 69: it all sounds exactly the same. those pads are present on earlier cbl albums but so far, i don't see the non-beatless tracks with interesting melodies. i guess i'll skip this one.

the easiest way to get a kick, and the only way to get a good one in the beginning, is to just use a sample (both exs24 and ultrabeat work nicely for this. ultrabeat has an a bit steeper learning curve but is also the more powerful tool). the much more satisfying method is to make it yourself. ultrabeat is your best friend here. there are lots of other kick synth utilities such as bazzizm/bigkick/... but i find that properly tweaked kicks out of ultrabeat need less processing. you can set the osc2 to a sine wave that sweeps from a high note in your scale to your root note. this is done by setting the one of the envelopes to control the pitch of the note. you can then adjust the curve of the envelope to your liking. additionally you can use one of the other envelopes to control the volume. i rarely see the need to use any other method. if i hear a psy kick i like i often manage to recreate it using ultrabeat. this is the kick i use in the track i'm currently working on. here i used to env1 to control the pitch and env4 (and curiously also env2... interesting) to control levels. the eq bell curve serves to reduce the "mud" frequencies around 500hz a bit. i'm not quite sure what you mean by syncing the bass to the kick. you create a region with the kick playing on every 1/4 and a second region for the bassline with the pattern you'd like it to play (most likely a note on every 1/16 except 1,5,9 and 13). once you've done that they should be perfectly in sync.

thanks for the offer. but even though it's not too practical to use and the result is often barely understandable, google translate is still good enough to help me find a few rare releases that aren't avaiable elsewhere

genau. yeah, 20 for such an unusual location is quite ok. in vienna you'd pay that for a smaller venue with a shitty sound system and only one international headliner. that's why i'm considering going. normally i'd simply stay home, but i even missed out going to a festival this year and i've been at a total of 2 parties this year. so i've become less picky than usual sounds like a good plan.

so there are no simple colour settings for each theme? well, then i guess it's more important to keep psynews running for a longer period of time rather than investing the funds into making it look good. (in addition to that, even if we had more than enough funds, we probably still couldn't agree on which one is a good theme that's worth the money ). we'll get used to how it looks.

ридинг кириллик ис нот те проблем. андерстендинг рашен ис.

yeah, that's exactly what i ment above. the upcoming event has berg, blastoyz and some guy called bubble. listening to the samples all three are indistinguishable, all belonging to "future prog", which seems to be the replacement for the more commercial fullon variants. have you though about doing a futureprog side project? when you tell me 5-10k € per gig i certainly question if i should spend some time in producing that sort of music ;-). making some nicely mixed kick+bass and applying some tried and true blueprints to turn it into a track is a lot less work than composing goa trance. but i guess (as always when talking about commercial music) it matters much more if you're a big name or if you have good connections than the music itself. isn't it time for the worldwide psytrance scene to recognise that the israeli and brazilian mainstream scene play by different standards and lost all connection to what makes psy psy? why is it that their worst music always finds a prominent place among the underground scenes we have everywhere else?

no. at fist listen i thought: this is so 10 years ago it's pop-fullon. horribly cheesy, formulaic but energetic. that kind of music doesn't exist anymore. nowaways that niche of music (and i'm not even choosing an especially horrible example) sounds like this: it's not quite as cheesy, at least as formulaic as the track above and not energetic at all. there are more breaks and builds than sections with beat. you could at least dance to that growling machines track if you could manage to not puke from all the cheese, but this kind of music is extremely frustrating. "oh now finally a good section, maybe i should dance? no, i've not even started and we're in a huge break again.". this is then closely followed by "wtf, triplets again!". too many producers nowadays take loud's "why psytrance has become shit" as an instruction manual. the question of the week is: tristan is coming to my city but he's accompanied by three (!) israelis making above mentioned bullshit music (including that berg guy). would you rather catch tristan's set and go back home or would you boycott such an event in hope to influence organisers to not invite horrible "artists"?

since, we're at it now: the new darker theme has exactly the same amount of contrast as the old one. before everything was the same shade of white, now everything is the same shade of greenish-blue. can't they make a default theme that has white posts seperated by grey and everything on a blue background like the old psynews? or indeed any other combination of colours that makes it easy to tell apart different posts without having to resort to clues such as avatar placement would be helpful.

indeed. it probably has something to do with modern social media such as reddit. if you're among the first posters you'll get a lot of attention, but just a day later no one will even read your post anymore. people aren't used to communities like forums that work at a slower pace.

i've been using logic 9 for a few years now. where are you stuck?