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-- 2006 trance VS 1999 trance.... its dead now
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| Originally posted by Estuera Thanks for the compliment  And about the tracks sounding the same stuff...just check out all the stuff I did the last 2 years and you'll hear it's not that bad, compare castamara and second turn for example and you'll notice that they are very different. ( offcourse I do have a certain 'sound' in all my stuff but even that is evolving slowly all the time ) |
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| Originally posted by Demoted Ehh I can still here some sameyness between Second Turn and Castamara, but it's more of the trademark Steur sound. Currently it's more the guitaring samples and string samples in your tracks which are prevalent in Sonrisa, Second Turn, Nightshift, Above, and some of the other newer ones. I hope I'm not the only one that thinks they sound eerily similar. I still really like them, hell, Second Turn was on my myspace for a while there, but I could definitely go for a brand spankin' new guitar/string sample as well as some other new percs |
It's just my 'sound' shining trough I guess. I can hear the same thing with all the producers I like myself, so I don't really worry if that's the major concern people have with my music.
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| Originally posted by Estuera Believe me or not but I used different synths in all of the tracks you just mentioned and I can swear I never used the same perc loop twice It's just my 'sound' shining trough I guess. I can hear the same thing with all the producers I like myself, so I don't really worry if that's the major concern people have with my music.So back on topic |
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| Originally posted by Estuera Believe me or not but I used different synths in all of the tracks you just mentioned and I can swear I never used the same perc loop twice It's just my 'sound' shining trough I guess. I can hear the same thing with all the producers I like myself, so I don't really worry if that's the major concern people have with my music. |
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| Originally posted by Demoted Heh, yeah. Anyways, back on topic, sure 2006 trance isn't all too great. But dance music isn't supposed to be stationary and remain stagnant. To be honest, I'd be right pissed if trance sounded as it did back in 1999 because by now it would have been done over so many times it hurts (which it actually has in a sense). Just branch out beyond trance if it's annoying you, there's a whole other world out there, be it just in EDM, or whatever else piques your interest. |
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| Originally posted by weymouth It's just that every other producer is producing the same exact sounding tracks, that isn't your fault but it is annoying for the fans. If you, Alex Stealthy, Mike Foyle, and Leon Boiler all created a new single and asked the fans to try to tell who made which, it would be difficult to the average listener. Take your set from ASOT 250 for example: Jonas Steur 01. Fable- Above [Intuition Recordings] 02. Estuera Vs. Mr. Sam Feat. Kirsty Hawkshaw - Split The South (Jonas Steur "Revision Flow" Bootleg) [CD-R] 03. Mr. Sam - Split (Jonas Steur Remix) 04. T4L - Maximus [Blackhole Recordings] 05. Dawnseekers - Gothic Dream (John Johnson Remix) [Platipus] 06. Bolier & Coenraad - The Mighty Ducks 07. Kyau Vs. Albert - Kiksu [Anjunabeats] 08. Jonas Steur - Sonrisa [Intuition Recordings] 09. Governor Pres. Orjan - Arctic Globe (Festival Edit) [Intuition Recordings] 10. Re:Locate Feat. Menno de Jong - Spirit [Galactive] 11. Fable - Nightshift [Intuition Recordings] Some good songs in there, I like most of them as individual songs but put them into a set and there is no progression, energy, or even much change. I remember listening to that set after the classic hour(tough act to follow) and losing interest about 3 songs in because it seemed so similiar. Maybe they made yah play like that, I don't know, but trance used to have energy and hypnotic sounds and in it's place is orchestra energy trance. Maybe my beef is with the DJs and not really the copying producers and I wish I was less ignorant about the entire process but this conversation is good for the scene. |
you need to hear them live , that's what it's all about.
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| Originally posted by Spirit5 Yeah I agree. I've listened to a lot of the stuff in the trance section on Beatport but nothing that really engages me. I think the better productions are in the progressive house section, which also has some more melodic stuff in there. I don't think it's really McProg, but rather this more melodic progressive stuff that Armin nor Markus Schulz is playing much of. I'm talking about stuff like Snake Sedrick, Jay Lumen, Subsky, Clubbervision, Moonbeam, The Last Atlant, Yvel & Tristan, Cassino & Laben, Benz & MD, Retroid, Madoka, Storyteller, Joel Armstrong, Damien Heck, Darioef, Andrew K, V-Sag, Alican & Soner and many others... I think this area is where the really good stuff is coming from. If it weren't for sites like Beatport, I wouldn't have heard this stuff. |
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| Originally posted by Demoted I love all that stuff too, the stuff that borders the line between deep prog trance and prog house. You and I have probably about the same taste in prog, but I also love the more Sasha-esque type and the darker, housier, Digweedish tracks along with the more tribal. I just would rather spin more of the artists you listed |
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| Originally posted by Estuera And I advise you to think about 99 again, I remember Ferry Corsten for example putting out track after track after track with the same sounds and sometimes almost the same melody... |
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| Originally posted by Spirit5 Yeah I enjoy Sasha and Digweed stuff too. I got into them before I got into the big epic DJ guys like Armin and Tiesto, whom i'm not as fond of anymore (though I did get their latest CDs because I love a lot of the tracks on them, esp the first CDs). But I think the artists I listed do have some darker and more tribal stuff, like Snake Sedrick has a great track called "Friction", and even though I didn't list them, Opencloud and Shiloh are also great. And Subsky has some darker stuff as well. So I like it when artists can produce dark and light stuff or stuff that isn't super light nor super dark either. I guess you could call it a little more mellow music. What's also good i've found is that it's not really full on, so it's great music to chill to at home as well as to practice for warm up sets, because most DJs start off as warm up DJs, not headliners. And this is where me and you will probably start up obviously...since we are newer to this. |
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| Originally posted by SYNthSRI Another year..another thread of 'trance is dead'. Just let it go and go enjoy whatever it is that rocks your ears this year. |
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| Originally posted by SYSTEM-J There's also another side of this, which is apart from production, and that is musical talent. In the 90s you had to be a real musician, or something close to it, to make music. Now you can spend a relatively small amount on a couple of programs and be able to make music with no knowledge of music at all. I guess that's why the big producers of the past name diverse acts as their inspiration, where as most bedroom producers would say Armin. One group had a proper musical background, the other heard trance and jumped the easy train to making their own. The result is that a big percentage of today's producers can't write an original melody worth shit, let alone an entire song. |
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| Originally posted by Demoted Meh, I don't have any aspirations to be anything more than a bedroom dj really. I may send out the occasional promo whenever I feel good enough to record one, but I don't plan on being a club dj or anything more. Just spin in my room, space out, the usual. And this more mellow prog is perfecto for that. |
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| Originally posted by weymouth It's just that every other producer is producing the same exact sounding tracks, that isn't your fault but it is annoying for the fans. If you, Alex Stealthy, Mike Foyle, and Leon Boiler all created a new single and asked the fans to try to tell who made which, it would be difficult to the average listener. Take your set from ASOT 250 for example: Jonas Steur 01. Fable- Above [Intuition Recordings] 02. Estuera Vs. Mr. Sam Feat. Kirsty Hawkshaw - Split The South (Jonas Steur "Revision Flow" Bootleg) [CD-R] 03. Mr. Sam - Split (Jonas Steur Remix) 04. T4L - Maximus [Blackhole Recordings] 05. Dawnseekers - Gothic Dream (John Johnson Remix) [Platipus] 06. Bolier & Coenraad - The Mighty Ducks 07. Kyau Vs. Albert - Kiksu [Anjunabeats] 08. Jonas Steur - Sonrisa [Intuition Recordings] 09. Governor Pres. Orjan - Arctic Globe (Festival Edit) [Intuition Recordings] 10. Re:Locate Feat. Menno de Jong - Spirit [Galactive] 11. Fable - Nightshift [Intuition Recordings] Some good songs in there, I like most of them as individual songs but put them into a set and there is no progression, energy, or even much change. I remember listening to that set after the classic hour(tough act to follow) and losing interest about 3 songs in because it seemed so similiar. Maybe they made yah play like that, I don't know, but trance used to have energy and hypnotic sounds and in it's place is orchestra energy trance. Maybe my beef is with the DJs and not really the copying producers and I wish I was less ignorant about the entire process but this conversation is good for the scene. |
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| Originally posted by Trance-MB It's a radio show playing the newest tracks, so the setup is different than a setup for a live audience. |
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| Originally posted by RebeL9 no actually it isn't very different. take a look at Armins ASOT episodes and then look at the tracklists from the recorded sets from different venues. almost the same tracks played. |
So the problem is labels releasing too much garbage made by non-musicians who happen to obtain some audio warez? I guess I get a little upset when people even subtly suggest that ambitious kids trying to make music using their humble setups and short educations should not bother, people should always be encouraged to at least try I think, or there is no hope for things getting better.
The problem looks to be moderation, you guys seem to desire more professional musicians with traditional music training, records that are more a product of imagination and less a product of reason presets. What confuses me about that is the whole nostalgia thing. When I look up reading material off of places like hyperreal, from around the time when people still used the word Rave, I am not seeing professional musicians and formally trained artists. Instead I read about these anonomous pranksters, hiding behind hundreds of aliases, stringing together goofy samples from star trek teleporters and such. I am not reading much material that backs up this idea that your musicians of old were so much more professional and had such a superior musical background, althought it does look like making music back then was a larger investment than it is now. It seems in the glory days there were alot of these ambitious kids doing their own circuit bending and using these antique noise making machines for purposes outside of their intended use, generally playing around with electronics to make fun noises come out. The artists seemed alot like a small niche of music/tech enthusiasts rather than snooty music virtuoso types. Maybe doing the same thing with software isn't quite as glamorous, obviously it doens't require quite as much expertise to slings bits around in a predesigned interface as it would to say, wire up pathes for your giant modular synth.
It sounds like many of you are looking for improvements in the industry's systems of exclusion, you want labels to exclude the music you dont like, you want shops to exclude the labels you dont like, you want parties to exclude DJ's you dont like, you want clubs to exclude the subcultures you don't like. So you have to find out who are the best excluders! The question seems to be which DJ/label/producer deserves the hype and glory. There looks to be a demand for labels which are much more discriminating in who they sign. I for one appreciate how low cost and easy it is for a startup to get going in the music world today, because one of those startups may become your next innovator/pioneer in spite of 99 others which suck, but not if we go around telling them that they should be excluded.
So which labels are the good ones?, it seems we are in need of an elite tier of prestigous labels which gets more support than the ameteur internet music circuit. Maybe we need a list of which labels are worthy and which ones are the copycat digital ones. Really think the best thing we can do is just to keep trying to find the good stuff, and keep sharing with each other our ideas of what is and isn't good music. We keep this dialog going and eventually we form our little camps surrounding our different tastes, and those little groups we form help to dig up the best tunes for each corresponding taste, as listeners that is really the only thing withon our power to do, just keep digging and sharing until we have a big enough crew to hype up the tracks we consider "best".
A lot of the producers from the rave era who emerged as genuine artists and not novelty bollocks were proper musicians. Liam Howlett of The Prodigy is classically trained on the piano, for example.
Who fucking cares if their proper musicians? The music is the final test, and if the music sucks, then there. I think copy/paste is bad but you can't say "Genuine Artists," because that is assuming there is only one good approach to art that can be appriciated. What if I told you that only people who play real instruments should be counted?
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| Originally posted by DJSentinel Who fucking cares if their proper musicians? The music is the final test, and if the music sucks, then there. I think copy/paste is bad but you can't say "Genuine Artists," because that is assuming there is only one good approach to art that can be appriciated. What if I told you that only people who play real instruments should be counted? |
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| Originally posted by DJSentinel Who fucking cares if their proper musicians? |
Can our scene even support proper trance musicians anymore? Maybe the reason we don't have genuine talent and instead all these amateurs is that something in the trance world changed which makes it no longer capable of sustaining the more elite talents out there.
I have issues with money being used as a tool for discrimination, but I will conceed the people who invest in these expensive studios and years of training tend to make better sounds, simply because they put more time/effort/resources into their work than the automagic softwarez out there, which isn't to say that a person of more limited means can't also make worthy music, they just have to work harder to accomplish that.
Im thinking that our little music niche is working much in the same way a dancefloor does, nobody gets into the music when the floor is empty. We have a chicken and the egg issue to deal with before trance can get good again, we need hype to attract talented musicians, we need talented musicians to generate hype, much in the same way you need a crowd to get people to dance. The way DJ's do it, is they just keep trying different shit until people get moving on the floor, then they stick to what works for that crowd. I don't notice people trying alot of different stuff in trance, what I notice is alot of people doing the same thing, which leads me to beleive that they are in the "sticking to what works" phase, and that we are aleinated because that stuff is not working for us. Maybe the dancefloors aren't empty, maybe the crowd is enjoying it and are completely oblivious to the problems that we are facing. Music fans are quite fickle, trends leave everyone behind eventually, maybe we should just accept that the crowd is no longer interested in trance and move on with our lives. I'm thinking that the 1999 era had such great music because it had such a great audience, it was a cycle which fed on itelf and expanded until the fickle trends left it all behind. Those of us who are not so fickle and trendy kinda stuck to trance thinking there was something special about it, but maybe there isn't, maybe it is the same as any other social scene, vulnerable to fluctuating trends and only in style temporarily.
I've tried to fit in with the new sound of trance, but other than the few experimental tracks I have done, I cannnot be motivated by the standard and sound of current releases.
It has stagnated. Everyone is trying to be too intelligant to the point that they lose track of what the music is really about. The people in the clubs.
It seems that producers/DJ's are either aiming for the charts or for acclaim from the Muso's rather than the scenes core audience.
As far as the dance/electrnic scene goes at the moment. Drum n Bass seems to me, to be be the most exciting.
Pendulum, High Contrast, Sub Focus, Zinc n Jenna G, Ed Rush & Optical - all seem to be part of a scene that sounds more exciting, more fresh, more energetic and more original than trance does at the moment.
A sad but true fact (IMO of course)
Regards,
Brendan
Well, first off no one said anything ever in this entire thread about discouraging amateurs from producing music. It doesn't take much to tell that's not a viable solution. The problem is, a few years ago you didn't hear their stuff or see it everywhere until they were good enough and until their tracks were good enough. You also didn't hear about a lot of DJs until they were good enough (ie: radio shows, mix downloads). Nowadays, it's not uncommon to know someone who has a track out, or has a radio show, or to hear a radio show mixed by someone who's never played a real paying dj gig in their life. Lets all say it together now O-V-E-R-S-A-T-U-R-A-T-I-O-N.
Not oversaturated with awesome material, just hearing a bit too much about people who need more time to become better at what they do and develop real talent or originality. So what do you do when everything's thrown into the same pool? We already know it's not ethical to bring down the amateurs, so the only other choice is figuring how to better support the great stuff and the pros who have stood the test of time refining their talents through experience.. along with the real record labels.. yes the ones that weren't just started by people who couldn't find someone else to release their stuff! Like it or not, it's either this, or accept the consequences of having one massive pool where you better be an expert with all the patience in the world to be able to find enough of the great stuff before you move on.
Bandwagoners ride the trends or what's in style.
As for someone like me who's been DJing actively in the scene for 11 years and who listens to & appreciates a broader range of music than 99.9% of those on this board, I distance myself not because I've forgot how to appreciate something or because it's not in style.
I distance myself for a bloody simple reason. The quality of the productions has turned to boring shite that goes nowhere big for me.
I don't like to spend half an hour going through a bunch of records I'd prefer never to hear again. And if the best of them is something that is just decent, well that's not what I'm looking for. I am not out to find a decent record, I'm out to find something great. Something that gets me excited and that I want to hear again and again. Something I can't wait to play out. Not something that is just okay that I will hardly want to listen to still a few weeks later. So when I'm faced with the choice of playing half assed tracks, or shifting to a genre that seems somewhat on fire with the level of exciting productions (breaks/prog/electro) then that's what I do. There are still SOME great (dancefloor friendly) trance tracks out there but I just don't have time to find them and the fanbase for trance has dwindled because those people themselves don't find/hear enough exciting great tracks.
It's pretty simple math really I don't know how some people can miss it.
If you had say, 1 amazing track in a stack of 15 tracks.... compared to 1 amazing track hiding somewhere in a stack of 50 tracks, what do you think is going to happen here?
There will be a lot less of a chance that people/djs are likely to find it. There will be plenty that will get too bored of looking through it all after hearing enough crappy tracks, there will also be plenty of people to just buy some half assed track because they got tired of looking and just choose the one that sounds at least decent enough to play.
I could sit in an alley eating cardboard for 5 days and then go eat a 7-11 burger and it would taste like prime fucking rib. This doesn't mean that 7-11 Burgers are gourmet cuisine though, it just means that after eating enough cardboard I'd jump at the chance to get take a 7-11 burger and be on my way.
By the way, earlier in this thread I mentioned about the lack of support for my the one main trance night here in Vancouver which was run by my good friends. Well I've been informed since, that the night is now gone. Another casualty of the damage the trance scene has been taking. I'm sure next time Armin's in town it will be packed though. But then, what's the reason it will even be packed? Packed from the hype and excitement around trance music? Or packed from the hype & excitement fo seeing a top 10 DJ put on by a promoter who can pull off a successful show with nearly any big name DJ?
Everytime I hear a new ASOT, I believe trance is the most powerful genre out there, that only gets better year by year. There's still future classics being put out. Red Woods by DJ Governer could have been put out in the late mellennium, and we would be talking about it today.
I still think trance from 1990-1996 sounds better than anything today.
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