Do you REALLY hate tarnce/tracne?

[nasenmann]

I don't know much about trance but the impression I got from a few pieces that I've heard is that they could be algorithmically generated. You could have a trance app that generates complete trance tracks. A style that is so predictable and repetitive quickly becomes dull to me. I don't mind repetitive electronic music but I like it when it sounds like there is a human at the controls making creative decisions. I don't like listening to something that sounds like machines running on autopilot.

Of course, I could be completely wrong because I've only heard a handful of trance tracks but maybe my comments will provoke some interesting discussion.

Nah i can see that, but to be fair you could also write an algorithm that produces simplistic rock music.
I think a lot of the human element boils down to little erratic things, noises, weird intonation that grows on you, stuff like that. That's how a very formulaic piece can still sound human.
If you get good at including these subtle elements in otherwise cookie cutter compositions, be it completely aware or rather accidentally, that personal stamp might make it worthwhile.
The deal with techno/trance is that esp. with the advent of fully digital production environments, these little flubs tend to happen a little less than when you'd record a guitar or an analog synth.
So in this increasingly perfect and analytical environment, sometimes additional measures are required to reintroduce that happy accident factor, which just kind of took care of itself when people were going through the hassle/joy of live recording and manipulation of physical gear.
This is in no way meant as an anti software argument, i'm a software guy mainly and find it quite easy to include some elements of randomness. You just gotta want to do it.

[CableChannel]

I think the thing is, every genre seems to be all the same if you look from the distance. Once you come and look closer you see the fine differences.

Now if you don't like the genre, you can bully against it being all the same shit.

If you like the genre you indulge yourself in the tiny facettes and variations.


Same with everything it seems, take Whisky. You don't like it you never look at it, you like it you have 20 in your house and relish the nuances.


Only one exception: big room house and djent. These two genres are REALLY all the same song.

[nasenmann]

Yeah, perception is always very relative, though not absolutely so.

Allow me an analogy that some might consider racially charged:

The notion that africans or asians look more alike from whitey's perspective. On one hand it's based on ignorance to a large degree. The more people of a specific ethnicity you get to know, the more you realise how relative it all is.
On the other hand, sometimes there really is a little less variation going on. You can't argue against asians having less variety in hair color (except central tokyo lol)

Somewhat less variety also has pros and cons. I've seen very few blacks in my life who i'd consider butt ugly. Caucasians win in that regard hands down. More genetic variation = more unfortunate experiments.

But all things considered, human perception always evens things out.
I hope people can apply that to music somewhat without deeming it offensive

[ghettosynth]

ZenPunkHippy makes an interesting point about the repetitiveness of the music allowing for interesting social interactions to take place. I can respect that...but it's also damning the music with faint praise.

I agree with your assessment, but, for me, a lot of purely repetitive stuff stands on its own. That said, the problem with trance isn't really that it's too repetitive, it's that it's not repetitive enough at the right scale but too repetitive at the wrong scale. The obvious song like structure of the boring and expected breakdowns and hand in the air moments interrupt necessary repetition at the scale needed to induce a "trance", whereas the lack of human input in the repetition at a smaller scale makes the time between the big moments boring. It has become techno for people with short attention spans.

For repetitive music, I prefer funk, reggae and Afrobeat, where the repetition requires physical commitment and a certain mental discipline and spiritual humility on the part of the players.

That's just preference though and it comes across as trying to imply that somehow when people play that repetition is better. Perhaps you like that, and I'm not saying that I don't, but I appreciate good repetitive EDM for its own sake. It's something that cannot be accomplished by the best of musicians and it has a different affect on the mind precisely because the machine has more discipline and physical commitment than any human can muster. That kind of repetition plays with the mind, but, it becomes boring if you don't introduce human variation in some way. The thing is, when you play notes in time on a traditional instrument, you have no choice but to introduce human variation in very specific rhythmic ways. When you use a machine, you can choose to apply that variation in other ways. IMNSHO, this is what makes EDM different, it is the machine. When live bands try to perform "house" it always sounds like funk, that's humans lack of physical commitment. You can't fault them for it, but after centuries of nothing else, I'm not surprised that there's resistance to thinking that there's value to "playing" in a way that eliminates or mediates the human/timing interaction.

When I hear Tiesto play, the problem to me isn't the track over track repetition, it's the lack of measure/phrase over measure/phrase repetition. I need at least 20 minutes of good controlled repetition to get in the right mind state to enjoy dancing for hours. Gigantic builds and breaks totally disrupt that state.

[jancivil]

It's something that cannot be accomplished by the best of musicians and it has a different affect on the mind precisely because the machine has more discipline and physical commitment than any human can muster. That kind of repetition plays with the mind, but, it becomes boring if you don't introduce human variation in some way. The thing is, when you play notes in time on a traditional instrument, you have no choice but to introduce human variation in very specific rhythmic ways. When you use a machine, you can choose to apply that variation in other ways.

You've tied yourself up in knots here.

"the machine" has no mind. It has no discipline. That is insane. Then you destroy your own premise by admitting the boredom of that. Then the human has to do something. The clock does not groove; the element that is groovy has to do with the deviance from the clock. One would assume you must know this in your body... I'm sure if someone wanted to get really cute with impossible things, the machine is a handy tool. But we are not in this area with trance, I mean what do you feature you're doing with that? You've confounded 'repetition' with clock time.

One of your premises is that the human cannot help but specifically vary the rhythm? Well there is a whole lot of music that disagrees with that. How does one come to the place that one argues such shite: A human cannot help but choose/the machine gives you choice [in other ways! Please demonstrate by examples. Then I will show you say Vinnie Colaiuta.].

So I posted the Gnawa trance music. This is where the term 'trance music' comes from, actually. It is very repetitive and they can go on and on; but the meter modulates through devices such as the 16ths are taken now as threes so it is now three scanning against a faster pulse. I would think a person interested in music finds the human decision in real time exciting and happening, and enjoys flow and all kinds of things. But no, in this age of computers and //Producers//, people that can't be arsed to get the chops (and make a beat in fact) we see preferring to evacuate from humanity; and we see this kind of argument. Which I think serves to justify being lazy and remaining incompetent. The reason I find all trance I've heard so far deficient is a product of people that can't be arsed to make rhythm happen through their own devices. On top of being quantized to something no one would *do* (that's not a good thing, I say) it's copy/paste, copy/paste ad nauseum.

Yes, the human is not going to be a perfect clock. Who would want it? The children that cannot make things happen on time and require to quantize everything really do evidence the undesirability of that. If you ever really made a sequencer timeline conform exactly to some rocking or grooving music you would know it's not one BPM, it changes quite often; you would know something. Really, one would know better having made some real grooves happen in the sequencer without that machine standing in for her actual real life discipline. The groove breathes, it has ebb and flow. It's human music, made from the subtle body with the skills and training, the intelligence, the discipline, the commitment of someone to music.

So up there you actually argued for the the discipline, THE COMMITMENT (turn it off and watch its 'commitment' now) of something with no mind. It's amazing to see such a use of language. (That 'commitment' is really something. I mean I don't take you as someone that can't know the meaning of the word! It's perverse.)

The person that does really interesting things with the sequencer is informed by their ability with time for real. Using the machine does not avail you of anything through itself, let alone this superior choices to someone with real discipline on an instrument.

[vurt]

now, i could be reading between the lines here, but, i take it youre not a trance fan then jan?

[Frantz]

Nah i can see that, but to be fair you could also write an algorithm that produces simplistic rock music.

The difference is that rock music still needs someone playing guitars, someone singing lyrics, etc. My feeling is that trance could be entirely machine generated.

For example, here is one guy's attempt at it. Every time you click this link on anticulture.net, it generates a new MIDI file: Random Trance Music Generator

It will output random progressive melodic trance music that is similar to high energy eurodance and techno music from the late 90's.

Admittedly it's not that great but it illustrates the point.

[robogone]

It's something that cannot be accomplished by the best of musicians

How do you know?

[ZenPunkHippy]

Nah i can see that, but to be fair you could also write an algorithm that produces simplistic rock music.

The difference is that rock music still needs someone playing guitars, someone singing lyrics, etc. My feeling is that trance could be entirely machine generated.

For example, here is one guy's attempt at it. Every time you click this link on anticulture.net, it generates a new MIDI file: Random Trance Music Generator

It will output random progressive melodic trance music that is similar to high energy eurodance and techno music from the late 90's.

Admittedly it's not that great but it illustrates the point.

Did you explore the site further? Main page:

http://www.anticulture.net

Random Modern Jazz Generator
This powerful random generator will produce songs that are similar to music created by Frank Zappa, Igor Stravinsky or any other modern times music composer.
- Neotenic

Admittedly it's not that great but it illustrates the point ...

Sorry, couldn't resist

Peace,
Andy.

[Frantz]

Did you explore the site further?

I did. The thing is you could take one of the better MIDIs generated by the Random Trance Music Generator and produce it with high quality sounds and trance fans might like it. Random Trance Music Generator could be very popular on SoundCloud.

I don't think the Random Modern Jazz Generator is as convincing although it's amusing.

[robogone]

Andy has a good point though. Until you immerse yourself in a type of music it's not really possible to realize what goes into creating it.

The argument seems to go somewhat along the lines of the person who plays the instruments and the level of their ability is a direct measure of the quality of the music. There are those who 'wrote' songs and had a strong hand in the creation of them in years past who were never considered musicians of poor quality - Michael Jackson, Joe Meek, Jello Biafra come to mind - all of whom had a huge input into the creation of their music. It's nothing new that there are those who direct the creation of music without being good musicians - why is it a problem now?

[ZenPunkHippy]

So I posted the Gnawa trance music. This is where the term 'trance music' comes from, actually.

Anyone who has listened to psychedelic and Goa trance for more than a moment knows and understands the relationship between the ragas and trance music of India and the trance inducing rhythms, melodies and drones of modern electronic trance.

One of the early pioneers of Goa trance (which was later forked to become psy trance) is Raja Ram. You can hear him playing flute on this track by 60s band The Quintessence:



He is an extremely talented musician. At the age of 72 he is currently banging out some great psychedelic trance (1200 Mics) and psychedelic ambient (Shpongle) to name just 2 of the projects he is involved with (there are many, he also runs a record label).

By no stretch of the imagination could you call this man a digital mouse jockey with no appreciation of the finer points of groove, melody, or any other aspect of music played by humans (or computers).

But that's just one example. As stated many times in similar threads most of the very best producers, those reach the pinnacle of these genres to stand the test of time, were real musicians first, but have moved towards digital production because ... well I don't know ... I guess they've found a way to express themselves that they enjoy.

Peace,
Andy.

[ZenPunkHippy]

The thing is you could take one of the better MIDIs generated by the Random Trance Music Generator and produce it with high quality sounds and trance fans might like it. Random Trance Music Generator could be very popular on SoundCloud.

That's most likely because your listening to it from the point of view of a non (trance) listener.

I've heard other "trance generators". They work to a point, but there are nuances that are just not possible (yet ..), and so while parts of the tracks sound reasonably convincing many of the elements that make a great trance track are missing.

I also know this from my own experience with software and hardware sequencers. Straight quantisation rarely works, there is no groove. It has to be played in by hand or programmed in minute detail to get it just right, and this takes time.

I don't think the Random Modern Jazz Generator is as convincing although it's amusing.

I understand your point, but I'm fairly certain that a bit of tidying up and proper selection of sounds the RMJG could fool someone who is not very familiar with or never listens to modern jazz.

Peace,
Andy.

[Frantz]

That's most likely because your listening to it from the point of view of a non (trance) listener.

I've heard other "trance generators". They work to a point, but there are nuances that are just not possible (yet ..), and so while parts of the tracks sound reasonably convincing many of the elements that make a great trance track are missing.

Yes, I'm not a trance listener. Point taken but even you're admitting that parts of it sound convincing to you as a trance listener.

On the other hand, RMJG sounds like a joke to me.

[ZenPunkHippy]

Note: I haven't listened to either of the generators, just making some general comments.

Point taken but even you're admitting that parts of it sound convincing to you as a trance listener.

Anyone can slap down a 4x4 kick pattern, off-beat bass line and some hi-hats and sound reasonably convincing, but it won't sound great with out plenty of additional work (which requires a significant amount of skill and experience).

Part of the reason this type of question is asked in the first place is because we're in the middle of one of many particular phases. This means we can visit Soundcloud and listen to lots of "trance". Is it good trance? Depends on who you're listening to, but the answer is often "no".

Like in the 70s there was probably a glut of funk or prog bands playing the local club circuit. Where are they now? Most have been consigned to the history books as also-rans, average or boring bands that couldn't make it due to lack of talent + drive.

Peace,
Andy.