The Music Scene of Today

Written by Bacter

The Year: 1999
The Day: Thursday, 19th of August
Topic: Music
Point of View: Israel
Situation: Fucked up

In the past 40 years we've experienced many new kinds of music, from the Rock in the sixties, continuing with the 70's disco, moving to the 80's dance music and europop & techno in the beginning of the 90's, Prodigy's New Beat music in the middle of the 90's, house in the past two-three years until we reached the year 1998 when TRANCE music started to rule in Israel.

What I'm talking about here is people's lack of musical sense, the people who only know to jump and "dance" to the repetitive 'bassdrum-hihat' series of beat, recycled simple melodies and an ugly bass in the background which create together the style of TRANCE.

Personally I don't think we need to reject this new electronic music style because everyone today gets a little crazy sometimes and everyone wants to play a full-volume fast rhythmic music, or even make one, but it's DEFINITELY not our usual everyday music!

I simply think that making a trance is the same as shitting, because all you do is sit and shit notes and basses all over the tracker, maybe you add some 'cool' Rebirth sequences and basses... and if you want it to be in a good quality you probably make sure all the samples are pure 16bit and 100% hardware generated sequences (computer sequencers or professional equipment) except the Bassdrum-Hihat samples (usually Open Hihat).

So SIMPLY, what you did here is BLASTED your .IT or .XM file with tons of 16bit sequences saved in .WAV format and created a file which is bigger than MP3 because of the quality. (Here's a useful place for the MP3!)

Wake up dudes!! There are other more fascinating music styles in the world except trance/house!

The amazing Necros and Purple Motion don't make scene-music any more... at least we still have Radix in the scene (am I right?).

What I have come to say here is - Don't let the trance fuck your head up! It's not everyday music!! People want it to become everyday music and are sure it will be in some day..

I definitely don't wanna see myself in few years listening to a trance music in my background and enjoy it!

Now there's another problem: the tracking quality.

For the people who track trance using 100% sequences: Rebirth was meant to make song in the program itself, and maybe for sampling but DEFINITELY not for recording 200 sequences and squeeze them in an .IT file.

So for all of you guys who did that until now - learn to use Rebirth to make your songs!!

Well if you wanna earn money from electronic music in Israel and you don't play an instrument, you gotta earn it from Trance, and for releasing a CD you have to make your track sound good (CD quality).

But not necessarily from sequences!!! You can take advantage of your tracker!! That's what trackers are for!! If you stick 900mb of waves then you cannot call yourself a tracker, even if you are tracking trance!

Put sequences in your track only if you REALLY need them, like a pre-generated bass from Rebirth or alike..

But if you wanna make your whole song from pre-generated samples then don't waste your time in a tracker! As I said before, use Rebirth or similar programs to make your song!

Another thing is, that in today's music scene it's hard to find music with a good chord progression and continuous leads like Necros used to do.

Everyone is influenced by the commercial 'artists' who make simple house music and release it to MTV. I don't say that people aren't allowed to make house music but I wanna say that there are too many people that try to make some house/trance music with the simple formula of bassdrum-hihat and a few house notes ("Melodies") in another channel, I'm sick of that. IF you make house music then make it sound good. An example of good commercial house bands: Jean Michelle Jarre and ATB.

If you have a talent to write leads and lines, use it in wisdom.

Trance/House isn't a challenge! Maybe house is a bit... but real challenge is to write real song, for example: continuous leads, chord progression, a groovy drum beat, groovy bass, hmmm... there are tons more.

And one or two sequences that are hardware generated can be nice too!!

Ususally people who can make good music except of trance are dudes who know to build chords, people who can seperate the three notes and write chords beginning from three notes and up more.

And there are LOTS of these out there.

I don't wanna see a trance song winning a multi-channel music compo (although I've seen that already).

Do some thinking, there are three different scenes - the real commercial music scene, the demo scene and the TRANCE scene. The trance scene should be a small part of the demo & music scene, but not rule it as people want it to.

Bacter / Quasars