recursion loop

I think a cheesy and lame melody is a cheesy and lame melody regradless of the genre and a great melody is a great melody regradless of the genre. Psytrance has some restrictions, you typically will have less chord/keynote changes and more repetitive patterns because you don't want to lose the hypnotic momentum, but still you can have your melodies and harmonic sturctures as sofisticated as you want. Okay the last one has all cheese in the world but still sounds very cool

Thanks Actually the latest tracks might be released at some point.

3 weeks to 3 years Been doing that for a while but sorted my acoustic treatment and got proper monitors only this year

Fixed that for you

I think someone who is muscially trained or can play a musical instrument will make better electronic arrangements even in non-melodic genres because when you can actually play music you have better feel for things like call-response, tension-release, climax etc., also you can drop an occasional key change or a small melodic line to make things more interesting. That's may be why electronic music becomes less exciting as a whole despite all the cool software we have in our disposal, younger folks never saw anything but a DAW in their lives and they learn various production tricks from Youtube having zero musical backrgound. It's a kind of polarizing topic whether psytrance needs melodies, some people cosider psytrance should sound challening and melodies, especially of more accessible, pleasant sounding kind, should be avoided because they would make it more cheesy and less psy. I, for one, think that a great melody can turn an otherwise forgettable track into a masterpiece. I listen to various kinds of psy but 95% of my favourite tracks contain at least some melodic parts and most of them have some elaborated melodic work.

One needs to know some musical theory for that, rare thing amoung psy producers Check out some South African twillight, like Tickets or Brethren Or some U-Recken

Equalizer in Spire is somehwat similar to Virus eq, in the sense that it can radically change the tone and turn a lame sound into a pretty cool one. Overall don't expect that Spire would behave in exactly the same way as Virus, it's not an emulation. It seems that they wanted to make a synth that would sound similar to Virus when making EDM and classic trance kind of stuff, like plucks, supersaw leads and such, I think psy/goa/acid wasn't their main interest. Forgot to say, there is also Acido filter, did you try this one?

IDK, none of these sounds melodic to me. Maybe only Lunarave, some bits in the second half. They aren't completely atonal but that's not enough to call them melodic. By melodic I mean some sequence of notes that makes some sense on its own without the sound by which it's played and the surrounding synths and beats. Basically soemthing you could play on a piano or guitar and it would still sound recognizable and express some emotion. As far as Lunarave goes, this track has some good melodies The Asia Tribe track has great depressive/dystopian vibe which I really dig. To me it actually sounds "darker" than a typical darpsy track with all the howling synths and random FM noises.

Great melody! My favourite filter for that kind of thing is Scorpio, try this one.

I mean I don't have big name label releases, a cool looking FB fanpage and all that

I once talked with Urs Heckman (the man behind Zebra, Diva etc) at the KVR forum, he essentially thinks Virus doesn't sound good to him and has many technical flaws, like aliasing and other. It seems that software devs consider Virus to be obsolete digital tech so analysing and copying it doesn't seem to be rewarding or interesting to them. Which is technically true - the engine can alias, the oscillators can't reproduce full bandwith, the filters are far from an accurate analog model etc, etc. But it does sound great.

Virus does some things which Spire can't do. Virus TI2 has a full-blown wavetable section with some unique wavetable FX, global unison, cross-oscillator FM Also there are sonic differences, like Virus sounds bigger/fatter/darker, with much more midrange presence. You can make Spire sound like that with some extra processing if you know what Virus sounds like and what you should aim at, also you can pull off some Virus-like sounds from wavetable synths like Serum and Parawave Rapid, but Viurs is Virus. That "the distance" track (you know that track) was made with heavy use of Virus (and also Microbrute, so I think it's like 50% hardware, 50% software)

Don't pretend to be a "real producer" but I know a thing or two about DAWs, synths, music production and theory. Here are my attempts if someone is interested So if this really happens I don't mind contributing something.

For what I know there will be no new Viruses, Christoph Kemper is now making guitar amp sims and the chips the Virus is based on will be out of production soon.

Spire can sound similar to Virus, mostly the VA and unison based stuff. Leads, plucks, pads, acid, it covers that more ir less. To my ears it sounds thinner, softer and brighter than Virus but in an actual mix they can be pretty much interchangeable (i have both). It doesn't do wavetables and the FM sounds very different tho, do it's not a full replacement for Virus TI. If you like Virus, check out also Adam Szabo Viper synth.

It's the first preset in Z3ta+ software synth, called 8bar First Contact That melody is embedded into the preset. here it's played in isolation

Idk, it's that is jsut a pad I guess it might be a JP 8000 preset or something. I indeed heard something similar in quie a few tracks. That melody at 2:30 here, does anyone know what's that?

Idk, in psy context "dark" and "melodic" seem to be mutually exclusive. In my book, dark and melodic might be something like this (dark not as in darkpsy, but as an opposite to happy/euphoric) Or this None of these are exactly modern tho.

I see, I find most goa boring and sounding the same (with some great exceptions tho) I'm mostly a full-on/prog guy myself. Yeah, tastes differ.

Anyways

That Etnica remix sounds totally great to me. Regarding the Future Ducks track, i love it I does have a good dose of self-irony. I don't believe it was made for self-promotion or to take the piss out of the scene, rather I guess they have collected all the stereotypical criticism about progressive/minimal and made a track of these stereotypes, just for the fun of it. Certainly LOUD can't be accused of the lack of creativity

LOUD https://www.discogs.com/ru/artist/429462-Loud-6

Compared to some Vini Vici stuff and similar, I think Future Ducks of London is actually a decent track.

Sorry for the OT, i didn't listen to that album myself, but if Eguana gets mentioned at Psynews i'd like to share some info about his goa and psy works. He was making a lot of stuff throughout the 2000s as Nord Project, mostly fluctuating bewteen melodic goa and full-on. Most of it is now available at Plexus bandcamp. Not all of it has aged well, but the tracks like Vuala, Swamp of Sorrow, Shaman of the Black Fate Castle, White Wolf still sound great to me https://plexusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/luminous-world https://plexusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/hidden-world https://plexusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/goamatica https://plexusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/terracore https://plexusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/amoeba-destroyer

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