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-- How to innovate trance...?
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quote:

Originally posted by Mr.Mystery Unfortunately this isn't unicorn fairy land but the real world, and it simply doesn't work like that.

So your saying that you would give up trying to learn something if it is considered "born with" just cos of that? and if you really want it, what will you do? bite your tongue and give up? thats a shitty way of living...

im not a "born" athlete, so what? i can't try running fast if i like it? im sure that i will get good at some point, maybe i wont get as far as people who do that from when they were 5 but that wont prevent me from trying...

I have seen some good arguments here, but I miss one IMO:

A lot of new musicalstyles were born because of new technologies.
Back in the days of hardware synthesizers a new synthesizer on the market often had a new distinctive sound, it even got used for things it wasn't intended for and therefor creating something new.

For example, without the Roland TB-303 we wouldn't have had all those acid tracks.
Without the Roland Jupiter series we wouldn't have had all those supersaw tracks.
Without computers and and the use of infinite plugins, tracks wouldn't sound as crisp and tight as they do now.
However, the last years haven't brought us a totally new synthesis technologies that are so new and refreshing as back then.

But of course it's not only about that.
It's about making choice's and what type of track a producer wants to make, and what audience he is making it for.
The bigger the audience the less room there is for innovation, because they won't understand. The other way around, the more experimental music gets, the less people you will find who will really understand it or like it.
You could end up very puristicly playing random noise with just 3 listeners who will really enjoy it
In my opinion it's a combination of the two to make it succesfull, and depends often more on luck than on skills.
(I hope I will get lucky today )

quote:

Originally posted by Benno de Goeij For example, without the Roland TB-303 we wouldn't have had all those acid tracks. Without the Roland Jupiter series we wouldn't have had all those supersaw tracks. Without computers and and the use of infinite plugins, tracks wouldn't sound as crisp and tight as they do now. However, the last years haven't brought us a totally new synthesis technologies that are so new and refreshing as back then.

your right all the way, but i tried immagine a new type of synthesis that doesnt exist but its just so hard coming up with something...

i say lets go back to the sources, try include live instruments in your tracks, and not guitars pianos etc., how bout an oboe? or a french horn? trombone?

maybe a sitar, a banjo... and take sounds from your surrounding... hit the table and record it, a glass... something...

quote:

Originally posted by Vortex_SA i say lets go back to the sources, try include live instruments in your tracks, and not guitars pianos etc., how bout an oboe? or a french horn? trombone? maybe a sitar, a banjo... and take sounds from your surrounding... hit the table and record it, a glass... something...

True, innovation is also about making new combinations, however some combinations might just not work that well.

The weirder the combination, the harder it is for a producer to make it sound like a well blended powerfull mix. There aren't much out there who are capable of doing so apparently.

(I will give your hints a try though )

quote:

Originally posted by Vortex_SA So your saying that you would give up trying to learn something if it is considered "born with" just cos of that? and if you really want it, what will you do? bite your tongue and give up? thats a shitty way of living... im not a "born" athlete, so what? i can't try running fast if i like it? im sure that i will get good at some point, maybe i wont get as far as people who do that from when they were 5 but that wont prevent me from trying...

Of course you can learn things and no, you shouldn't give up but you need to accept the fact that everyone can't learn everything, sometimes it's just down to skill and talent.

quote:

Originally posted by Vortex_SA Im sorry but i just dont belive in something being "born with" i think anybody who wishes can learn everything... and music espacially today involves lots of math, beside math like in bach's compositions etc. you have now all the producing math and synth math...

I know it seems anti-thetical, because dance music was founded on a DIY ethic, and I'm not saying that you're either a born musician or not.

What I'm saying is that far too many people think that they can be a musician because of the ease of finding the necessary tools these days. They have no respect to the craft of being a musician. They think "I like trance, I can get hold of Reason and figure out how to make music that sounds just like the trance I like".

quote:

Originally posted by Benno de Goeij True, innovation is also about making new combinations, however some combinations might just not work that well. The weirder the combination, the harder it is for a producer to make it sound like a well blended powerfull mix. There aren't much out there who are capable of doing so apparently. (I will give your hints a try though )

i gave some of my hints a try, a french horn through a breakdown is awesome also heavy distortion guitar riffs in the background but thats not so innovant... i also tried trumpets once, but thats just too flashy for what i needed... but the most important thing is to really play those things... sampling isnt working that good for those instruments...

check out "looking for the light" at www.myspace.com/xetromusic
at about 1:04 there is me playing my french horn (there is also me playing some electric guitar in there)...

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J I know it seems anti-thetical, because dance music was founded on a DIY ethic, and I'm not saying that you're either a born musician or not. What I'm saying is that far too many people think that they can be a musician because of the ease of finding the necessary tools these days. They have no respect to the craft of being a musician. They think "I like trance, I can get hold of Reason and figure out how to make music that sounds just like the trance I like".

i agree but i think that they just want to express themselves, i dont think anyone would think to himself "im gonna make trance like someone els", they probably think "ill make stuff like this but better!" and probably screw up in the process...

and Mr. mystery, its true when your talking about competition or something similar, not when your talking bout producing... you have all the time in the world for that, you can spend years on one track, and in the end it doesnt comes to whose more naturally gifted, it comes to who made a better track...

I think you're too much of an idealist. If you want to make good music, you either go through the years of training or you're a natural talent and can go straight into it. People think that technology removes the need for either.

quote:

Originally posted by SYSTEM-J What I'm saying is that far too many people think that they can be a musician because of the ease of finding the necessary tools these days. They have no respect to the craft of being a musician. They think "I like trance, I can get hold of Reason and figure out how to make music that sounds just like the trance I like".

Yup, its EASY to make a generic trancer.. yes its fucking EASY!! making trance is in general easy. Making a tune u can listen to several houndred times, thats hard and demands skill, talent, luck and creativity.

Re: How to innovate trance...?

quote:

Originally posted by Barachem I've been reading and discussing about the so called shite state of current trance. I admit, there's much shit out there even if there are some gems. Personal tastes aside, what should future tracks bring to refresh and renew the genre and scene?

A good place to start would be if before they made a new track producers would get a couple of episodes of ASOT and listen to them and then make music that does not sound like that.

If you want to breakthrough or produce something revolutionary. You have to know the history of the genre, learn from the past and present trends. Just like people who write books. That's why musically inclined (or simply educated) people usually bring up better Quality (not better sounding) music, but it also requires skills.

It's about trying to make something "avangardist", trying to define a trend before it becomes popular, imo that's how precursors think.

Genuine "child prodigies" are actually very rare, if they even exist.

The funny thing about "prodigies," especially the best ones, is that they quite often come packaged along with a parent or instructor hounding them for hours and hours every day into being the absolute best that they can be, so that it's very hard to separate the influences of "nature" and "nurture."

Mozart was like this, for example; his father was the best music teacher in Germany and also quite a taskmaster who started giving little Wolfgang Amadeus lessons at a very young age. Mozart did have absolute pitch, though, so he did have at least a bit of help from "nature."

IMO, the most important thing to achievement in most areas, even music and math (see the case of Ruediger Gamm, the German "human calculator" whose math abilities were utterly unremarkable until he started practicing for hours each day), is simply a will strong enough to push through any obstacles. Bach expressed this when he said, "Anyone who works as hard as I did will do as well as I've done."

A pretty daunting declaration to any aspiring musician. Maybe he was exaggerating a bit.

quote:

Originally posted by Benno de Goeij I have seen some good arguments here, but I miss one IMO: A lot of new musicalstyles were born because of new technologies. Back in the days of hardware synthesizers a new synthesizer on the market often had a new distinctive sound, it even got used for things it wasn't intended for and therefor creating something new. For example, without the Roland TB-303 we wouldn't have had all those acid tracks. Without the Roland Jupiter series we wouldn't have had all those supersaw tracks. Without computers and and the use of infinite plugins, tracks wouldn't sound as crisp and tight as they do now. However, the last years haven't brought us a totally new synthesis technologies that are so new and refreshing as back then. But of course it's not only about that. It's about making choice's and what type of track a producer wants to make, and what audience he is making it for. The bigger the audience the less room there is for innovation, because they won't understand. The other way around, the more experimental music gets, the less people you will find who will really understand it or like it. You could end up very puristicly playing random noise with just 3 listeners who will really enjoy it In my opinion it's a combination of the two to make it succesfull, and depends often more on luck than on skills. (I hope I will get lucky today )

Exactly.

quote:

Originally posted by Barachem I've been reading and discussing about the so called shite state of current trance. I admit, there's much shit out there even if there are some gems. Personal tastes aside, what should future tracks bring to refresh and renew the genre and scene?

There are lots of things you could say...

Here's a proposition, and maybe you'll agree with it:

The simple fact that a track "sounds professional" doesn't necessarily mean that it ought to be released, played out, or doted on.

I'm reminded of something that Bob Moog said in an interview not too long before he died:

"To the extent that more people now are being able to engage directly in making pop music I think the advances have a positive direction, shall we say. Everybody has certain reservations about how easy it is now - not to make really original good music - but to make pale imitations of music. Something that appears to be music, but is really just something mechanical or filled with gimmicks. One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music."

I think that among a lot of newbie producers there's a kind of aggressive and unapologetic ignorance of general musical principles and history, and a desire simply to make something that "sounds good" rather than any genuine drive toward originality or personal expression.

How many producers these days struggle with thoughts like this?:

'Okay, let's say I can make something that sounds nice and glossy and professional and fits right in with any of the tracks released on my favorite labels -- but do I really have any compelling ideas and feelings to express or evoke with my music? And if not, why the hell am I doing this?'

IMO, far too few people are thinking in those kinds of terms, and that's why there's so much derivative crap: legions of essentially unoriginal and boring producers simply won't keep their hands off of the synthesizers and sequencers, because those kind of thoughts don't occur to them, or they just don't want to face the fact that they are "composing by numbers" rather than adding something that really deserves to be remembered.

And that would be fine -- I don't have anything against people making music in their spare time simply for their own gratification -- but it's because it's so easy now to publicize the results of this kind of uninspired doodling that we have the current situation.

quote:

Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles There are lots of things you could say... Here's a proposition, and maybe you'll agree with it: The simple fact that a track "sounds professional" doesn't necessarily mean that it ought to be released, played out, or doted on. I'm reminded of something that Bob Moog said in an interview not too long before he died: "To the extent that more people now are being able to engage directly in making pop music I think the advances have a positive direction, shall we say. Everybody has certain reservations about how easy it is now - not to make really original good music - but to make pale imitations of music. Something that appears to be music, but is really just something mechanical or filled with gimmicks. One always has to remember these days where the garbage pail is, because it's so easy to make sounds, and to put sounds together into something that appears to be music, but it's just as hard as it always was to make good music." I think that among a lot of newbie producers there's a kind of aggressive and unapologetic ignorance of general musical principles and history, and a desire simply to make something that "sounds good" rather than any genuine drive toward originality or personal expression. How many producers these days struggle with thoughts like this?: 'Okay, let's say I can make something that sounds nice and glossy and professional and fits right in with any of the tracks released on my favorite labels -- but do I really have any compelling ideas and feelings to express or evoke with my music? And if not, why the hell am I doing this?' IMO, far too few people are thinking in those kinds of terms, and that's why there's so much derivative crap: legions of essentially unoriginal and boring producers simply won't keep their hands off of the synthesizers and sequencers, because those kind of thoughts don't occur to them, or they just don't want to face the fact that they are "composing by numbers" rather than adding something that really deserves to be remembered. And that would be fine -- I don't have anything against people making music in their spare time simply for their own gratification -- but it's because it's so easy now to publicize the results of this kind of uninspired doodling that we have the current situation.

This is true ,i also think that many young producers think like that, "lets produce a nice track for the sake of producing it". But, thinking of it, definitely NOT all of them thing like that.

Think is, that even by producing new, complex melodies doesn't equal to innovation to our "experienced trance ears". That is, even if a producer comes with a nice complex long melody, i bet that the majority of us would criticise it as boring "ASOT trance", simply due to the fact that it has the same 7-9 minute intro-break-outro super-saw lead-line status (structure). Recently, i took a listen to some new epic trance tunes in Youtube to find-out more about the current state of the genre (i rarely listen to trance these times), and i noticed, that whilst the structure is bloody boring and uninspired, using the same synths and ideas (to the point that you can't distinquish between producers!), a FEW (not all) of the tracks had very complex, non-generic lead-lines (exceeding 16-note stabs). Some tracks like Airbase- "Escape", Cape Town- "Touch the Sky, Talk to the Stars" , Solar Express- "Magma", Leon Bolier- "Ocean Drive Boulevard", Mike Foyle- "Fire-Fly", Lolo- "Who Are You", Daniel Kandi- "Make Me Believe" and a few others were IMO distinct melodic-wise from the rest of the trance-blob. Problem is that:


1) NUMBER OF RELEASES:
There are massive amounts of present trance releases which sound similar, and hence better releases tend to get lost within these waves of releases.

2) ACTUAL SIMILARITY:

Even these better releases share similar sounds (maybe not exactly similar, but most of them indeed share),ideas and structure. That is, whilst they don't lack in "Musicality", they lack in INNOVATION. That is IMO, "INNOVATION" is not always equal to "MUSICIANSHIP" and "INSPIRATION". For the most experienced listeners, this is a massive let-down.

3) PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTOR OF EXPERIENCE:

Continouing directly from the second factor, most experienced listeners are so fond with the present intro-break-anthemic-lead-line-super-saw-outro structure of trance, that they don't even bother to listen to any epic/melodic-trance tunes at all. In psychological terms, they have become "habituated" to the sound, to the point that they desperately need something "more" in order to get their "fix" (the "habituation", and its' opossite mechanism called "sensitivisation", are present in almsot ALL psycho-affective processes). Probably many people here used to receive goosebumbs when the break and the super-saw lead came in full effect. Unfortunately, due to extensive over-use of the current trick and sound, this specific structure gradually lost its effect on the minds of most experienced listeners, reaching a point that not only it doesn't evoke any response, but on the contrary, causes feelings of boredom or, no feelings at all (causing extensive hate in TA!).



Ofcourse,as i said before, the structure must be distinquished from its' content. IMO (and as i stated before) some melodies of modern tunes are quite good (i imagined some of them being played by a different instrument such an an electric quitar or a violin and they were "still" nice or actually, nicer...!), and i also think that such long melodies would generally never be found in older epic-trance tracks before 2001. Problem is, that such nice themes and ideas get lost in this boring samey-same epic-trance structure which is here from 1998 or something, making all of us more experienced listeners get bored to hell. Ofcourse, the problem here is "US" and not the actual music. Proof of this is that today's trance has a substantive amounts of dedicated youngsters which love their music.

Still, the idea and structure must change, since they are extremely over-used. Melodies can still grow bigger, i actually like that.

Being original is easier said than done.

Also, a lot of producers like the trance sound of today. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. No need to reinvent the wheel. That's how lots of producers and musicians are thinking, not only for trance, but in other genres. It still works on the dance floor.

I could say that trance should stop using super saws. It's part of the genre. Change it, and it's starts to not sound like trance.

I could say rock should stop using 2 guitars, bass, and drums. Add different things, and it stops being rock.

I could say minimal should stop using old drum machine samples, and that they should add a melody. It stops being minimal.

And while it may be easy to make a generic trancer, it's hard to make something that sounds good. If the "generic" trance that TA hates so much is so easy to make, why isn't everyone famous? Just because the tools are there doesn't mean it's easy. And even if music is cheesy, doesn't mean makin' it is easy.

quote:

Originally posted by Docuebag 100% Being original is easier said than done.

not really

it just takes balls

you have to take a risk in order to be original, you have to embrace your mistakes and missteps, and move out of your comfort zone.

maybe uplifting trance is so comforting to people that it makes it more difficult

quote:

Originally posted by Docuebag 100% I could say that trance should stop using super saws. It's part of the genre. Change it, and it's starts to not sound like trance.

WTF? Since when was trance defined by the supersaws?

quote:

Originally posted by Mr.Mystery WTF? Since when was trance defined by the supersaws?

Uhh, uh....

Since the Dutch got their hands on it.

quote:

Originally posted by nefardec not really it just takes balls you have to take a risk in order to be original, you have to embrace your mistakes and missteps, and move out of your comfort zone. maybe uplifting trance is so comforting to people that it makes it more difficult

Well the problem is being original and sounding good at the same time.

Look at the visual arts. I can get a urinal and flip it over and call it original and art. I think that's a bunch of crap. So do many people. People in their ivory towers and so-called intellectuals will call it genius.

quote:

Originally posted by Docuebag 100% I could say that trance should stop using super saws. It's part of the genre. Change it, and it's starts to not sound like trance.

I`d actually take a Supersaw over those plucky Anjunabeat tracks with chopped up vocals and rolling basslines any day.

quote:

Originally posted by Docuebag 100% Well the problem is being original and sounding good at the same time.

this is the root of the problem. we need a paradigm shift in regard to what 'sounds good'.

this is what i meant with getting out of one's comfort zone.



there are a lot of classicists that think something like aphex twin sounds horrendous, but then there are a lot people that think aphex twin sounds awesome...

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