Psytrance

What it is

What Goa turned into once the records stopped being made on Atari sequencers and started being made on computers with unlimited tracks. The change was mostly one of tempo and focus: 145 rather than 138, the modal melodies pushed back or removed entirely, and the interlocking of kick and bass promoted to the main event. Israel, South Africa and Germany all had scenes by 1999, and the template that came out of them has barely moved since. The rhythmic core is easy to describe and hard to get right. The kick occupies the first sixteenth of every beat and the bass occupies the other three, so the two never overlap, and the pair of them read as one continuous instrument running at sixteenth notes.

What it sounds like

A short punchy kick with almost no tail, a rolling bass filling the gaps behind it, and above them a top end made mostly of noise: a shaker running the sixteenths between the beats, a closed hat on the offbeat and an open hat on the last sixteenth of every beat. Melody, where there is any, is a short atonal blip line rather than a tune. The mix is loud, narrow at the bottom and extremely wide at the top, with heavy use of stereo delays on everything that is not kick or bass. Everything below 120Hz stays mono and is gated hard.

Key elements

• Kick and bass as one instrumentThe kick takes the first sixteenth of every beat and the bass takes the other three. Gate the bass with the kick so the two never overlap even by a millisecond.
• Open hat on every aThe last sixteenth of each beat, ringing until the kick cuts it off. It is the most recognisable thing about the grid, and darkpsy is the only other page here that keeps it.
• Closed hat on the offbeatOne hit on every and, sitting between the kick and the open hat. It supplies the pulse that the open hat is too loud and too late to supply.
• A shaker under everythingThe e, the and and the a of every beat, at a whisper and panned wide, cut off the beats themselves so the kick transient stays clean. It is the noise floor that makes the mix sound like one continuous object.
• Blips rather than melodiesShort, resonant, atonal one shot sounds placed on odd sixteenths. They carry the arrangement in place of a tune and there are two or three of them in a bar.

How to get them

• KickA sine sweeping from around 150Hz down to 50Hz over 90 milliseconds with a clicky top layer. Total length under 250ms, hard gated so it is silent before the next sixteenth.
• BassA single filtered sawtooth or square, decay around 100ms, three sixteenths per beat. Sidechain it to the kick with a 1ms attack and a 40ms release and low-pass it at 500Hz.
• Tune them togetherKick and bass on the same root note, checked by soloing both. If the low end pulses unevenly, nudge the bass by a few milliseconds rather than reaching for an equaliser.
• HatsOpen hat on the a of each beat at 84 to 96, closed on the and at 76 to 84, both in one choke group. The open hat should still be ringing when the next kick lands on it.
• ShakerBetween velocity 28 and 44 with the beats cut out, hard panned in alternating pairs, with a resonant band-pass sweeping slowly across it over sixteen bars.
• Mix loud and narrow at the bottomEverything under 120Hz mono, a high-pass at 200Hz on all the top end, and a limiter doing three or four decibels. This music is mixed for outdoor rigs, not for headphones.

Reference points

Infected Mushroom, GMS, Cosmosis, 1200 Micrograms, Shanti Matkin, and the Phonokol, Spun and TIP World catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.