Quote:
Originally Posted by TweakHead
Yeah, not so much into the melodic stuff myself. Even though I don't like it when it just feels like random fx flying around - it needs to be musical, but I've grown to like the real alien like sort of music. It's a matter of taste. Also think the mix is key, but don't necessarily agree that having emotional melodies is an essential part of trance music.
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I probably should have mentioned the fact that there are a lot of different variatons of trance which still qualify as "trance", I just think of trance and psytrance as two different genres despite the term trance being present in both.
Not that Wikipedia is the end-all defining source of music definitions, but I think the definitions put forth there do a reasonable job of representing how I think of the two genres, and how others I know and have collaborated with think of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trance_music
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_trance
I do like psytrance too, but I feel their musical goals are different:
I think of good psytrance as sort of an assault (in a good way) on my ears of some creative use of FX-heavy sounds, that mostly strives to identify itself by originality of the sounds themselves and arrangement of them.
Trance I think is more like traditional music in the sense that it tends to stick to a base of standard "instruments" (sound categories), like an analogish bass sound, plucks / stabs, lush supersaw pads, usually that evolve slowly, dreamtrance synth patches, 4 on 4 drums with an aggressive kick, arp synth sounds that aren't "too" far out there and alien, etc. The creativity comes into play not so much with the sounds themselves but the melodic arrangement, the way tension is built up and released, etc.
Maybe a bigger defining factor is that with trance, there tends to be sort of a recurring anthem that identifies the tune. That anthem and other melodic parts could be then taken out, and a gazillion remixes created of the track using different genres. For example, you could take a basic trance song and come up with a psytrance or hardstyle remix of it, while retaining the basic roots. On the other hand you rarely see the converse being done -- a psytrance track is rarely remixed into an anthem trance track, because there's less raw material to work with and it wouldn't make much sense to do it? It could be done but it wouldn't be preserving the original most likely, if that makes sense.
Again not trying to say my definitions are the way things are, that's just how I view the difference.