Padmapani

after giving it some dedicated listening time i can say that mirage is my favourite ticon album by far (which doesn't say too much). it's not groundbreaking and uses many tried and true elements of progressive psy, but does not do so in an obnoxious way at all. it pushes the right buttons at the right time. it's like someone used the progressive psytrance template for this album, but executes it so well that i don't find anything wrong with it. plus it has some nice melodies and plenty of acidlines if someone asked me what progressive sounds like these years, i'd show them this album. it has everything they need to hear (even if it's not necessarily my favourite style), without rough edges that need polishing, in a way where everything fits together nicely. that said, i'm not a big fan of stimulant as it sounds too much like minimal/electro/house/whatever to me. behind the wall and violent serenity are also lacking a bit in the atmosphere department and rather average. but mirage, entropy and ether are have everything i expect from progressive and therefore more than compensate for the less-good tracks. out foxed and tripticon are also quite good. still, for a best progressive release of 2016 this album is up against stiff competition. the contenders so far are robert elster - still breathing, john 00 fleming - alter ego and ticon - mirage.

yes, of course. some companies even specialise is finding newly produced content that contains snippets of sampled audio. of course it depends on who owns the copyright and if they care about getting sampled or not, but in general you would have to clear every single sample you're going to use if you want to avoid the possibility of legal troubles. that's why i try to avoid samples in general and when i deviate from that i make sure they are CC0 (or so obscure/not associated with any company that no one could possibly find out i used them).

dude what? i don't even remember an argument about etnica, much less me disliking them. you must be confused. mapanani? lol. your post made me hungry, i'm going to eat my panini now.

sorry i mixed it up. but with double p it is two characters longer and therefore even more amazing i thought going to the sauna naked is normal anyway (in europe). we don't have anywhere near the sauna culture of the nordic countries (and i'm not a big fan), but carrying a towel is the absolute maximum tolerated over here; even in public saunas. interesting. i thought the norwegen was the metal capital of europe. perhaps they are just "idealised" in metal culture because they're even further up north the only one you made look like a clown is yourself. and you just did it again with your answer to richpa's post.

do we have some sort of ignore function, so that i can hide all of goa pride's posts?

what a nice way to advertise your release... i'd be very careful in accusing others of having a bad taste in music, when i put out a compilation that sounds like a superfluous and more bland rehash of cpu's self titled album from 2003.

defending is something you do on your own soil. not in iraq, pakistan, afghanistan, yemen, ... @topic fins are weird people, speaking a weird language, making weird films and of course also weird music. with saipuakaupias they also invented the longest "natural" palindrome. i think finland somehow is 'the japan of europe', though i wonder how the fins managed to cultivate their quirkyness without being isolated on an island as the japanese did. i really think we didn't need another u.s./russian foreign policy thread. those turn out quite repetitive anyway.

i've just recently discovered the comparatively obscure ott eps.

i think reverb is essential for highhats. it's just that you have to get the right amount. often the best and easiest solution to really fixing mixing problems (especially frequency balance problems) is to upgrade to a better listening enviroment. when your speakers accentuate the highs you will always turn them down. when your speakers lack bass you will always compensate to make it sound good on your listening environment. the only workaround is to find reference tracks (of a similar style) that you know sound great on many different systems and try to imitate the volume levels and overall balance.

ra, chi-a.d., khetzal, artha, shakta, morphem (i know that one is impossible). of course mindsphere and miranda/ominus would be nice too but they are not must-see-at-all-costs acts like the above. others on my list (etnica/pleiadians oldschool set, dimension 5, artifact303, e-mantra, filteria, astral, hallucinogen, nova fractal, ...) i have already seen. i'd love to do so again, but there's already a checkmark besides their name. also: talamasca oldschool set, but i'm not expecting lestat to play anything but cheese anymore...

sounds a bit like planet ben indeed. but it's so distorted that i can hardly make out anything. maybe it's just an average progressive track with a shitload of distortion on top?

i still don't see that as disagreement. some new goa makes choices in arrangement/mixing/mastering so that it sounds rubbish on shitty speakers. while i said that we shouldn't have those shitty sound systems and you say it should be mixed differently so it sounds as good as other stuff on those systems, it's clear that ideally we should listen to music that sounds good on all kinds of sound systems on a good sound system

exactly. i often fiddle around with patches a long time after creating them, solving mixing problems in the synth - not possible with a "oldschool" analogue synth. i copy channels to make variations of patches all the time, sometimes to try out things, sometimes because those few notes sound a lot better with more sync (or whatever); in the middle of the creative phase i often have 80 instances of zebra, 20 instances of diva plus a few others, up to 150 channels - all that is not possible with hardware. i would have to change my workflow 100%. diva is pretty accurate imho. i've done a patch that sounds almost indistinguishable from the original shine on you crazy diamond synth. just a little fatter, because i don't have to worry about fitting it into a track. if i don't hear a difference then it's accurate enough for me. but that's not too useful for psytrance and not even the best thing it can do. minimoog oscillators with jupiter filters and that awesome ensemble chorus is just divine. try to do that with hardware i thought the virus and nord lead were digital synths anyway? so basically a softsynth in a box... i honestly think that we don't have to choose anymore nowadays between precision/clean sound and warmth/alive sound (if we don't want to). 10 years ago it was different with all the digital synths sounding digital (albino with that cheap plastic sound was immensely popular), but virtual analogues have become so good in the last few years that we can have both. it might not always work out that well, but i'm pretty sure that that's due to lack of skill on my part and/or mixing errors...

it sounds very "metal", so i guess it's an authentic norwegian person (i.e. one of the ra guys) talking. if you don't have the right kind of voice while lacking a distinct accent i think artists should stick to samples or speech generators. that's valid for ra, electric universe (portamento would be much better if there wasn't boris sampling himself with that horrible german accent), m-run, and many others.

isn't that pretty much what i said?

just a hobbyist here, but i use only software. diva wipes the floor with the analogue synths it's based on. i see no reason to use any hardware synth (except of course a real 303. up to now there's no emulation that gets it quite right). good softsynths offer much more functionality and stability while sounding just as analogue as real hardware and being much cheaper. what i couldn't live without, but many producers — even professionals — don't have is a midi keyboard. i need to play notes to find my melodies/progressions and like to twist some knobs to find better sounds/automation. i think that the midi keyboard offsets any disadvantages that having only softsynths brings.

that depends on the music. with a sparse arrangement (your typical fullon) loud mastering can sound good, but with most goa trance having so much going on it sounds just awful. there just one big mush of sound, you cannot make out single elements and the beat is drowned out by all the layers. i find that it rather sounds good when homelistening with good speakers than in the non-ideal circumstances you have at a party (where loudness and cheapness compromise the quality of the speakers and the location of the event as well as your position on the dancefloor are most likely detrimental factors). if the sound system isn't really good then even nicely-mixed-and-mastered music like (new) filteria can sound like shit compared to the mediocre fullon that comes on afterwards. surprisingly much of oldschool goa doesn't have that problem. probably due to different kick/bass and less layers... interesting how you group those. lunar dawn sounds often sounds a bit too loud and crowded, lecro spektral daze even more so (+too much sharpness in my ears), but for blackstarrfinale i find myself turning the volume up . his music is a little bass heavy but the rest sounds pleasantly soft and has much room to breathe so that i don't find it tiring at all.

nice, especially the melody that really comes to the foreground at 1:20. i agree with simon that there could be more percussion. your kick and bass is pretty oldschool, like early 90s. personally, i'd use a bit more modern sounding kick/bass with a bit more punch. but the track surely also works nicely if you take the early goa route and make something with a softer kick and very weak bass that's rather focused on being trance inducing and that sounds like a the overlords/prana/voodoo people track from 1994...

but, why?

linz, austria.

what's up with the "VA - PSYCHOFLUID Evolution" thread? it's not particularly interesting to me, but if i click on it, i just see a page with "psynews driver error" and "there seems to be an error with the database".

zerosixafter is ok. a bit housey but decent. the other albums (except the 7th portal, which sadly has pretty bad production, but is otherwise really good) have always seemed to be too boring/housey/standard to even download them. so i'm really surprised about how good these samples sound. definitely better than zerosixafter...

sounds like it's going to be the best ticon album to date (at least since they dropped the "trip" in their name).

coming from a related discipline, but doing some mol bio for pharmaceutical applications at the moment. it's interesting. i think we have an unusually high concentration of people proficient in natural sciences on psynews (or even the "goa trance community" as a whole) compared to the general psy scene. well, maybe that's only because we're older

looking for the easiest way to increase the copy number of a plasmid.