Is it time for a post-modern interpretation of nineties music?

[progtronic]

I actually find modern EDM pop sounds pretty much like a carbon copy of the 90s Eurocheese stuff, just with newer synths and more risers. Which of course aren't the artists you were listing. If you listen to some early mid-90s cheese, it's formulaic in the extreme.

I wouldn't say carbon copy.. but there are a few throwbacks in some instances.

I think early Brostep, in relation to the stuff I listed.. has a lot of the elements of that older, heavier Electronic stuff. Unfortunately.. it's devolved to a point now, where it just sounds comical. Like a Looney-Toons cartoon soundtrack.. with each new track trying to outdo the last, with a ridiculous array of wobble squabbling back n forth..

But yeah.. the early, actual EDM (not the stuff I listed) is very similar to the more modern stuff. I think once the industry locked in on something that started actually making money.. more artists joined in, and a long lasting $$$ making formula was born...

...which is all pretty much Disco's fault, because that started it all.

[Echoes in the Attic]

90's was my favorite era of electronic music. Underworld, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Fatboy Slim and all that big beat stuff, the deep/tech-house. Good time.

[ghettosynth]

Why not just use hardware? Those top digital synths from the 90's are pretty affordable in 2018. Simply check the list of the gear your favorite acts used back then.

I'd start with a SY-99 and JD-990 for that late 90's sound.

Don't forget a Quadraverb and some sort of Mackie board. Add an Akai sampler and you're there. If you want to sequence that way as well then just go for an MPC2K.

[wagtunes]

Outside of the 50s and maybe early to mid 60s, there has simply been too much music to listen to it all. And since the 90s it has become out of control. One just needs to go to Wiki and do a lookup of list of music genres.

With all the music I've listened to over the last 54 years (I started in 1964 with The Beatles on Ed Sullivan) I'd say I've listened to maybe a hundredth of 1 percent of everything that's been made. And I'm sure that's true for everybody here, even if all you did from morning to night was listen to music. There is just too much. And then there's the stuff that very few people have heard. The real underground stuff. I used to be really into that but it got to the point that even the real underground stuff I couldn't keep up with, let alone everything on the radio and in clubs.

So when you talk about an interpretation of any era, let alone the 90s, all I can do is shake my head and chuckle because you're trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube after you've brushed and spit it out.

But have fun trying.

[rod_zero]

From the 90s the two most recognizable genres are grunge and eurodance.

Personally I think Madonna's Ray of light album would be the mainstream and best produced representation of that era, produced by Orbit it has all the cliches of the electronic music of that era. It isn't as cheesy as early 90s pop dance music, gets in to the sonic territory massive attack, Bjork and Moby.

Other very important album from the 90s was Garbage Version 2.0, it was so ahead of it's time production wise it still a benchmark, there is a song there (hammering in my head) with 150 tracks, a record at the time.

[tedannemann]

There you go, in 2018:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsoLEjrDogU

[Synthman2000]

90's Dark Side Drum & Bass (when it was actually good).

EMU Sampler
Mackie Desk for the overdrive.

Just out of interest, what would have provided the bass?

Probably :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msqrVjc-bZQ

[aMUSEd]

90's was my favorite era of electronic music. Underworld, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Fatboy Slim and all that big beat stuff, the deep/tech-house. Good time.

That and 70’s experimental/prog/new wave/jazz electronic music

[recursive one]

crap!

If you ask me, the music world didn't even know the real meaning of this word before futurebass.

Obsession with the 90's goa sound is now one of the importatnt trends in psytrance. Goa as a genre formed in early 90's then it was at its peak around 95-97 with classic Astral Projection, MWNN and Pleyadians albums and after that, when people realized that there is only so much one can do by twisting the cutoff knob on a 303, the scene moved on to try new synths and new approaches. But few years ago some people who were around 15-20 in 1995 declared that it was the best thing that ever happened to psytrance and are trying to ressurect the genre in this exact form it had during the mid-nineties.

There are some really talented artists in this newschool goa wave and some of the releases of last few years indeed sound like logical evolution of the classic goa sound, but most of these new guys are just blindly copying the form and completely missing the essence. While goa trance originally relied on innovation and futuristic aesthetics absorbing influences from techno, industrial, ambient, world music, psychedelic rock and whatnot, constantly trying new synths and new production tricks, the newschool goa mostly denies any innovation in principle.

TL;DR. While finding inspiration and trying to recreate some sounds and production tricks from certain periods of time in the past may be interesting and worthwile experience as such, I think that trying to sound exactly like it's 70s/80s/90s again unlikely leads to interesting results.

[Synthman2000]

A few other bits of kit doing the rounds at the time: Novation bass station, KB and Rack, COntrol Synthesis Deep Bass 9 (303 a like), most had a 101 knocking about, JD-800, JV-1080, JV-990, Korg Wavestation, M1, D-50, SY-85, Kurzweil, E-MU Morpheus, E-MU Proteus, E-MU Vintage Keys.

Make sure you mix on a set of Soundcraft Absolute 2 for an authentic mix.

edit: How could have forgotten the Korg Prophecy !

[Vortifex]

Amen break sample
Hiphop/disco/funk samples
Akai S950/E-Mu e64
Roland TR909
Korg M1
Korg Wavestation
Roland Alpha Juno 1
Roland JV-1080


Pretty much 90% of 90s music right there.

[sinemotor]

Sorry, I wasn't around in the 90s.

edit: How could have forgotten the Korg Prophecy !

My korg prophecy is older than me lol.

Anyway that revival is already happening in the underground scene at least. I can list some examples :

The 90's garage / deep house sound was all over the place in clubs the last few years
The Lo-fi House trend is exactly a revival of the 90's House music. Lots of Korg M1 sounds, TR 909, TB 303...
The Rave Techno revival with lots of breakbeat samples, Chord stabs, 909 drums, typical 90s vocal samples...
The Late 90's / early 00's Trancy sound is going back, as you can here in PC Music for example

And so on. It's not necessary "visible" yet but expect 90s / early 00s influenced music to surface in the mainstream in the next year or so.

[mgw38]

Shit, are you people high? 90's music was crap!

Every generation has the right to its own crap.

[shonky]

90's Dark Side Drum & Bass (when it was actually good).

EMU Sampler
Mackie Desk for the overdrive.

Just out of interest, what would have provided the bass?

I'd say definitely worth checking out this thread on reddit by Optical, covers a lot of the production techniques used on his early tunes up to the present day

https://www.reddit.com/r/edmproduction/ ... ecordings/

Regarding bass specifically -

Pure sinewave bass in boring.

It has no character, it eats up level in your song badly...it only plays back well on big soundsystems and it doesnt have any harmonics to play with. Yes you are big and clever when u get a clear sinewave in a track (actually hard to do well) but for most people it will not be played back well enough to get that floorshaking bass you want. Equally, if you remove the fundamental bass wave from a bass sound...it might sound good on the radio...or on a home hi-fi...but in a club its like drum &?

So...what do we need? Well we need a combination of a powerful overall fundamental bass wave with good complementary harmonics that give it enough frequencies to be heard in all situations but also ensure in a club it reaches the correct power to really shake the system. The most simple bass wave that is just above a pure sinewave is a Sawtooth wave with a LP filter removing the harmonics down to say 200-300hz...now you have a sinewave shape with some more character....still boring tho.

So we want more...and we can have it by adding more OSC's, distorting, filtering, fx...but the key thing is the bassier hits in your bassline should have less high/mid information and the accents and higher notes should have a lot more high/mid information, you have really serious power from the low notes and no interference with their fundamental shape, then much more detailed mid/tops in the accent notes/higher notes. Using a filter that is set to 'Keyboard' does this automatically...higher on high notes/lower on low notes. Using an LP filter with ADSR envelope will help with this too. Bass where you want bass, mid and tops where you want it to speak to you. Contrast is the key to space in a mix


Think this is a good example, although guessing from the title he used 808 samples

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4d7kZ4jUHo

[egbert101]

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