Hi-Tech Psy

What it is

Take darkpsy, add forty beats per minute and roughly double the number of things happening in every bar, and you have hi-tech. It came out of the Japanese and Israeli scenes in the early 2010s through producers like Hujaboy and Menog and the Parvati and Sonic Tantra circles, and it is the fastest music in this family by a wide margin. At 190 a sixteenth note is 79 milliseconds, which is short enough that a kick and a bass note cannot both fit comfortably inside one, so the kick gets shorter, the bass gets more distorted, and the whole thing turns into a texture rather than a groove. Whether that is enjoyable is a question of taste and stamina. It is the technical extreme of the psytrance lineage and it earns a page for that alone.

What it sounds like

Everything at once, very short. The kick is under 150 milliseconds and almost all click. The bass is a distorted square glitching between three or four notes a beat. Above them, hats on nearly every sixteenth, an electric snare on the offbeats, and a constant stream of small resonant one shots closer to sound design than to percussion. Nothing has a reverb tail longer than about 300 milliseconds because there is nowhere to put one. The mix has to be gated aggressively or it collapses into a single sustained noise, and a lot of the production work is deciding what to remove.

Key elements

• Sixteenth kick doublesAn extra kick on the a of 2 in both bars and two more at the end of the loop. At this tempo a doubled kick reads as a stutter rather than as a gallop.
• Hats on nearly everythingFourteen closed hits in bar one, with the two gaps at the a of 2 and the a of 4 handed to the open hat. There are more hat events per second here than anywhere else in this family.
• Electric snare on the offbeatOn the and of 2 and the and of 4, dry and pitched up so it survives being surrounded on both sides by hats within eighty milliseconds.
• Gate everythingEvery element cut off before the next one starts. At 79 milliseconds a sixteenth, overlap is what turns a mix like this into porridge.
• One shots as arrangementShort resonant blips rather than melodies, placed to break the symmetry of the grid. They are usually the only thing in a track that changes at all.

How to get them

• KickUnder 150ms, high-passed at 80Hz, with a click layer at 5kHz. Test it by playing four sixteenths in a row: if they smear together, it is still too long.
• BassDistorted square, three or four notes per beat, hard gated by the kick. Keep the filter low or the line fights the hats for the same part of the spectrum.
• HatsTwo different closed samples alternating so the run does not machine-gun, velocities cycling around 78, 52, 66, 52, with a transient shaper before the bus rather than after it.
• SnareAn electric snare tuned up two or three semitones with the tail cut at 80ms. Anything longer overlaps the next hat and stops being audible as a separate event.
• Deciding what to removeWrite the full arrangement, then mute one layer in every four bars. This music is authored by subtraction and it is the only way to keep it legible.
• Master conservativelyLimit two or three decibels, no more. The material is already dense, and a hot master removes the transients that make individual events possible to hear.

Reference points

Hujaboy, Menog, Farebi Jalebi, Sattel Battle, and the Parvati and Sonic Tantra catalogues around them. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.