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A Brief History Of Psytrance

Psychedelic Trance or Psytrance derives from the Greek word "psyche" which means soul and from the word “trance” which means ecstasy.

One of the very first terms used to describe the genre was “Goa trance”, because this music was first played in Goa India where the Hippies went on vacation during the 60’s and the 70’s. The hippie way of living postulated natural environment, virgin beaches, low cost of living, religious beliefs, spirituality and drugs. All of above were available, and still are, in Goa, India. The gathering of the Hippies and the parties that took place in Goa drew there the most popular Psychedelic Rock bands of the world including the Pink Floyd, The Doors and others.

In the late 70’s and early 80’s we had the industrial revolution of the electronics and Goa was affected by the electronic dance music just like every other place on earth. Instead of live bands, we had DJs spinning records. People applaud the medium (the DJs) instead of the musicians, for the first time. Lyrics were chopped, beats got harsher, melodies were looped, speedy bass-lines and filtered effects were added. Those new tracks were presented to the public as Trance music. New horizons opened for people who took part in the new mutant hippie movement. It was the Era of the disc jockeys. And through them, the trance scene picked up a pulse of its own.

Seeking a following, more artists were constantly showing up, sharing their passion for Trance music. Like-minded individuals were gathered to share their interests, cultural beliefs, all in the famous Goa. Even celebrity DJs joined the movement and propelled Goa Trance further mainstream.

In the mid 90’s the genre changed so much from its Goa roots that the term Goa Trance could no longer describe the variety of tracks being produced. A new term was coined, “Psychedelic Trance” or “Psytrance” for short, to refer to this new style of music. Now, it is common knowledge that the genre was mastered in Israel, by Israeli producers. Young kids with their home computers built on the idea, and they managed to take it to a whole different level.

Psytrance was initially made with synthesizers, that were all samplers for the most part. By the early 90’s, samplers had become reasonably affordable for any artist along with inexpensive analog gear. Some of the most famous synths used for making Psytrance in the early 90’s were:

- The Korg M1 synthesizer and music workstation manufactured by Korg from 1988 to 1995. It became the world's top-selling digital synthesizer of its time.

- The Nord Lead series of virtual analog subtractive synthesizers, manufactured by Clavia, released in 1994.

- The Yamaha SY99 synthesizer, combining frequency modulation synthesis and sample-based synthesis, was the direct successor to Yamaha's SY77, which was used for making electronic music the previous decades such as House, Disco, Synthwave and so on.

- The Roland JP-8000 is an analog modeling synthesizer released by the Roland Corporation in 1996.

- The Roland TB-303 and SH-101 although discontinued in 1984 and 1986 respectively were both widely used in making Psytrance during the 90’s.

At the same time we had the trackers. The term tracker derives from “Ultimate Soundtracker”, the first tracker software ever written, by Karsten Obarski, released in 1987 for the Amiga Commodore. Trackers were nothing else but a basic type of music sequencer for creating music.

During the 90’s, tracker musicians gravitated to the PC as software production in general switched from the Amiga platform to the PC. Although the IBM and compatibles initially lacked the hardware sound processing capabilities of the Amiga, with the advent of the SoundBlaster series by Creative, PC audio caught up and eventually prevailed.

Popular tracker used during the 90’s were:

- ScreamTracker 3

- FastTracker 2 on the PC and on Amiga Commodore 64

- Impulse Tracker on PC

- MED SoundStudio on Amiga and later on PC

- Symphonie Pro on Amiga that supported 256 channels!

A tracker's user interface is usually number based. Notes, parameter, effects and other commands are entered with the keyboard into a grid of fixed time slots as codes consisting of letters, numbers and hexadecimal digits. Separated patterns have independent time-lines; a complete song consists of a master list of repeated patterns.

New trackers were built for the world's dominating operating system; Windows. The tracker that was widely used in Greece and Israel for making Psytrance, Uplifting Trance, Nitchonot, and Trance in general, was “Mad Tracker”.

What about DAWs (Digital Audio Workstation)? People did use DAWs in the 90’s, but the few DAWs that existed until the mid 90’s, like “Pro Tools”, were mainly used by professionals. That is because the processing power of computers was not enough to handle the digital signal processing power that a DAW needs, and hard drives were not fast enough to stream audio in real time, so DAW systems required HIGH-END hardware. In 1991, “Pro Tools” was released, which was a DAW that could record and playback both MIDI and audio, with up to four simultaneous audio tracks. Pro Tools was the first widely popular DAW in professional studios. Home computer users didn't generally use DAWs until the late 90’s. Bedroom producers stuck with trackers, on the Amiga or PC.

In 1995, Cakewalk was one of the very few MIDI sequencers at the time. “Cubase” developed by Steinberg; the first version, which was initially only a MIDI sequencer that ran on the Atari ST computer, was released in 1989. “Cubase VST 3.7” in 1999 introduced a virtual instrument interface known as VSTi. This made it possible for third-party software programmers to create and sell virtual instruments for Cubase. The technology has become a standard for other DAWs, for integrating software-based instruments on the Mac and Windows platforms.

So DAWs did not become available to the home-user until the late 90’s. And it wasn't until the early 2000’s that VST started to displace DirectX as the most popular plugin format. “FL studio 2.0.1” released in 21 November 1999 supported DirectX plugins and live recording. And then we had the millennium.

“Ableton Live” was originally released in 2001. “Propellerhead Reason ver 1.0” was released in 2001. “GarageBand” was initially released in January 2004. “Reaper” by Cockos was initially released in August 2006. “Logic Pro”, a very popular DAW for the macOS platform, was originally created in the early 90’s by the German software developer C-Lab, later renamed to Emagic. It became an Apple product, eventually known as Logic Pro, after Apple bought Emagic in 2002. But we entered the new millennium and the rest is history as you know it.