Progressive Psytrance

What it is

Psyprog, if you are talking to someone who plays it, and zenonesque if you mean the narrower and stranger end of it. This is what gets played between six and nine in the morning at an outdoor party, and it is built on the fact that the difference between 138 and 145 beats per minute is enormous when you have been awake for two days. The rolling kick and bass stay. Almost everything above them goes. There is no lead, the backbeat nearly disappears, and the arrangement is one slow filter opening across four minutes with a new layer arriving every thirty two bars. Iboga and Zenon carry most of it. The closest relative outside this family is the hypnotic end of Berlin techno, which reaches a similar place from the opposite direction and about ten beats per minute lower.

What it sounds like

Warm rather than bright, which is unusual on this branch. The kick is longer and rounder than a psytrance kick and the bass has its top end rolled off, so the two sit like a single low pulse rather than a rattle. Hi-hats appear on two of the four offbeats and nowhere else. A maraca takes the sixteenth motion instead, quiet enough that it reads as room noise rather than as a part. Above that, a single evolving pad, a delayed blip that never quite becomes a melody, and a great deal of stereo width. There is often only one clap in an entire two bar loop.

Key elements

• Open hats on the first two offbeatsThe and of 1 and the and of 2 are open; the and of 3 and the and of 4 get a quiet closed tick instead. The bar audibly decays across its own length.
• One clap in two barsA single soft clap on beat 2 of bar two and nothing else anywhere. With no regular backbeat the loop never resolves, which is the entire trick of the style.
• Maracas doing the sixteenthsQuiet hits on the e and the a of every beat, thirty to fifty velocity. They supply the motion the hi-hats have given up on.
• A rounder kickLonger decay and more sub than psytrance, tuned to the root, so the low end reads as a pulse rather than as a series of separate clicks.
• One layer every thirty two barsThe arrangement is additive and extremely slow. Nothing announces itself and nothing is ever taken away suddenly enough to notice at the time.

How to get them

• Kick300ms rather than 200, sine tail tuned to the root, click rolled off above 2kHz. It has to blend with the bass instead of separating itself from it.
• BassThree sixteenths per beat as always, but low-passed at around 300Hz with a long filter envelope so consecutive notes bleed into each other slightly.
• HatsTwo open hats in the first half of the bar and two quiet closed ticks in the second. If you find yourself adding a fifth hat, you have started writing psytrance again.
• MaracasThe e and the a of every beat between 30 and 50, panned narrow, high-passed at 3kHz. They should disappear the moment you solo the drum bus on its own.
• The padOne patch with three LFOs at unrelated slow rates on cutoff, pan and detune, printed to audio across four minutes so that it never repeats itself.
• Resist the dropNo build, no snare roll, no silence. Change one element on a thirty two bar boundary and let people notice a bar or two after it has happened.

Reference points

Ticon, Atmos, Son Kite, Ace Ventura, Liquid Soul, and the Iboga, Zenon and Digital Structures catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.