Since I started running this blog, I gave my best to always be objective, and transparent. If I can be honest, I got bored writing at this level, and I will change the gear a bit and press the gas pedal a bit harder while writing blogs and making videos. I will boost my narrative and give a bit of controversy to my blog and videos I will make in future.
There is so much unsaid from my side to express my points of view on many things happening on the scene, as I gave my best to be transparent and not give anyone any space for the social networks attack provoked by my narrative. I will risk a bit and change the geat and see what will happen.
So, Uplifting vs Hypnotic. This is the blog post for this week as I have prepared the video tutorial about 5 different uplifter types which will be online today, 6th November (link for the video will be at the end of this page).
We are living in the era of uplifting music, and all main dancefloors are covered with any genre of uplifting music. It seems to me that those two expressions, uplifting and hypnotic can also be replaced with commercial and underground. We all can agree that the underground has also become a bit cheesy, but the main meaning of this term represents something that is a bit more extreme and different from the music that most people listen to. In order to understand the essence of underground music, a person must have a decent amount of intelligence, as underground music drives are mostly hidden and not noticeable on the first listen. To some people, those drives will stay hidden forever as they might not have the "thing" to understand it.
Hypnotic types of psytrance are some older progressive music, from the 2000s till today. From the golden era of Scandinavian Progressive dating from 2000 till around 2010, marked with the releases from Spiral Trax, Iboga records, Planet Ben, Tribal vision, with artists such as Antix, Atmos, Freq, Ace Ventura, Liquid Souls first album for 2006, Human Blue, Andromeda and other big names have carved the hypnotic feeling of music deep inside me.
Making hypnotic music is not easy, as making this type of music, there won't be many groove changes, the kick and bass will go forever and ever, playing the whole game with arrangement which is the main weapon of hypnotic music. The whole rhythmic section in hypnotic music shouldn't be too aggressive, the effect of hypnosis is much better if kick and bass are more polite and subtle, with fewer mids and highs, more playing in low frequencies. This way, kick and bass are perfectly aligned and give much more space for the sound design effects that will make the whole atmosphere of the track.
Uplifting music is super easy, and you don't need much intelligence to understand it. It is usually pulled together from powerful drum sections, tones of uplifters, so many grove changes all the time, super long intros and long breaks. The main idea of this type of music is to change the energy level up and down all the time, giving the sensation to the listeners. The only thing that bothers me with this type of music is that it becomes super boring after 20 minutes of listing to it, as the uplifting patterns start to repeat, and if I listen to more than 1 act of type of music, it usually makes me leave the dancefloor and search for some other activities that will be more fun than listening to the similar arrangement parties all the time.
I never understand how it is possible to have an arrangement template. I did hear a lot of times during my career about arrangement templates. How the F you can have arrangement templates? What is that you do than when you write music? Just changing the sounds here and there? This sounds more like a job than being an artist, which is true in most cases. Today, "artists" are using too many techniques just to follow hyperproduction, and compete with other artist competitors. The influence of the mainstream scene and financial slavery artists have if the music is their only source of income will make them make too many compromises and lose the main reason they started making music.
Luckily, we still have a lot of hypnotic music on the scene today, the hypnotic progressive is almost dead, I haven't heard any proper releases of this type of music for years and years, but the forest scene become super big, and I think it,s only representative of hypnotic music in psytrance scene. Must add that Zenon records releases are still in that hypnotic zone, but also not comparable with the forest scene, as only forest music almost don't have breaks and doesn't stop too often. Forest scene is downgrading for other reasons, mostly because of lack of sound design ideas, and this screen artist is using almost the same sequences and sound types all over and over, but this can be a different blog post.
With all of that being said, here is the link for the video;