Yeah I have realized that a lot of people trying to get into techno production struggle with that. They tend to use rely on functionnal harmony too much and the "techno" feeling gets lost. I guess thats also true for Electro, IDM, ambient and a lot of other electronic music genre.
Absolutely. Functional harmony and modal compositions are two different worlds. As soon as you evoke functional harmony, it's hard to get out of that and it sets up expected patterns of tension/release from all the functional music we've all heard.
I like to use frequency masking and volume techniques. So basically if you have 2 frequencies playing, one is going to fight with the other for 3 things. Place, time and space. So for my bass i eq nothing higher than mids, for mids nothing higher than highs and lower than start of the lows, and highs nothing lower than mids, which means i cut off all extra frequencies not needed and keeping only what i need on that channel. If you EQ instruments according to their fundamental frequencies to create some space for other elements it will give you a very well balanced mix. Then for sidechain i use an envelope follower to duck certain frequencies of the bass, you don't want to sidechain the whole bass signal, only certain frequencies. I use Ableton 12, so i put a follower on the kick and increase the gain a bit. Then i add eq eight, i use this eq to duck the frequencies i don't want present. I map the envelope follower to eq band 1(gain knob) which will be bass, set the amount on env follower to 50% and the max to 0%, this then creates a duck when the kick comes in, but only for frequencies not needed, creates space for others but you still keep the fullness of a great present bass at the same time. I usually set the frequency to around 100Hz and below, all that will be ducked. Sidechaining creates a deaf area because it eliminates most of the needed frequencies with the ones not needed. That's why you hear the coming and going effect in some mixes when listening to their sidechain. To create great music, one needs to understand frequencies and the role they play inside a mix
YES! I've had the same revelation in recent years. Despite going to music school in college, I didn't fully get the difference between functional harmony and modal harmony. But now I understand that as soon as you introduce a V > I movement, you set up functional harmony and the ear has a really hard time moving away from all the associations that brings up. Ron Miller's Modal Jazz Composition" is a great deep dive on this subject. I've also been exploring quartal harmony lately and coming up with great ideas. Quartal harmony gives you a nice palette of chords to work with that don't evoke that V > I movement at all. Plenty of videos on youtube about it. Cheers Dash!
Super video mate - as someone who made psytrance since 1999 and have little to no knowledge to music theory outside having a C or D base note and just using whatever sounded right the last 25 years. but hey i am also an idiot who have no idea what i am doing - i just looooove messing around with music and make weird sounds.. keep up the good work - i rececntly made my new liveset template from one of your videos and played in - worked flawless. :)
I'm just getting into this idea, but I recently made an instrument in the grid that's just a saw going into a Sallen-Key BP 2 with a lot of resonance, and there's a merge device with a bunch of values on the left side, and the output is a modulator out that controls the cutoff of the filter. The point of this is that if you tune the values, you'll get a bunch of notes that seemed to be hidden in the oscillator, which is just droning on one note. But the notes you get by filtering are always OK, i.e. you can't go wrong with them.
I experiment alot with alternative Tuningsystems. Like 31, 19, or 24 EDO and make Techno or very experimental music with it. Its so interesting to explore new ways to create unheard chords, melodys etc.
Solo World Synth is a plugin with sounds but the interesting thing is that it has many other scales like arabic and so on. Notes between notes is possible. It's +50 instead of +100.
🔥 This is a really insightful video. Good to raise the visibility of this approach. I always thought it was fun to hear how both middle-eastern and Celtic vocalists both sing a lot of quarter tones.
Same here. And I just had this thought about the ai replacing musicians topic: as soon as you for example open this tonal Pandora’s box, which really has unlimited options, that what you do with it, cannot be replicated by ai. And I think that’s THE antagonistic definition of art per se. As soon as you open up to what’s beyond your prescribed tool set, the system, the proven, the daw is you enter the world of art. Only then. That world is the only one that can reflect us. The „touring“ mirror in the chaos.
@@SnetremAip ai can already replace most mainstream music genres, in a year or two you wont be able to tell if the mainstrain shit you hear on the radio is human made or not, psytrance is a little more complex which would make it cost more time and resources and nobody is gonna spend years and millions of dollars to make ai produce complex fart sounds to excell in a niche music genre with pretty much nothing to be gained in the end, but as ai develop there will eventually come a time were it will be able to mimic even the best and most complex psytrance, and probably surpass it easily just like it did with psychedelic art and most other artforms, thats the sad truth
@ Authenticity and integrity. Creativity and inspiration. We aspire we trust. These are traits only humans can have. From my love I need that. From my food I don’t. Don’t mix them up in your head.
@@SnetremAip sure, but does those things really matter when ai starts making better music than you and everyone else and it can do it instantly? it already happened to alot of other artforms that claims those sames values and its already happening in the psytrance scene, it would take litteral months for the best psychedelic videos creators to make videos the ai needs 10-15 seconds to create and cost 0.01% of the price, 90 % of these psychedelic music producers who claims these values and cries about ai uses ai generated videos as background for their music because its convinient for them, everyone claims integrety but they really have none, and thats the only thing out of the 4 that really matters in the end
It's super eye (or should I say ear) opening! I'm sure Ableton can do it, I don't recall the method - I know some synths can load their own tuning files, personally I prefer DAW tools because you can fine-tune them etc, I believe there's a device similar to this "micro-pitch" in the M4L stuff, I just don't recall the name.
Live 12 now natively supports non-western scales that divide the octave in other numbers of semitones (I think Ableton calls them "scale steps" in that context) than 12. The built-in plug-ins that operate on MIDI (like the arpeggiator, the synths and MIDI effects that come with Live) then take care of the changed scale structures.
Have you considered using a parallel instance of a synth globally tuned 50 cents higher so when used in conjunction for say, a melody, you have an equally tempered 23-tone per octave scale instead of just 12-tone per octave available?
Not exactly that, but I've been thinking of ways of "faking" EDO systems with a pitch-wheel and modulating it by 50% in steps, this is a great idea tho thanks!
@@DashGlitch and especially intervals that allow for completely different chords. you could find a balance between trying to write chords and not feeling restricted by the given harmonic functions of western music, but without having to come up with cents offsets that might not always solve a clear musical purpose. xenharmony solves that because the intervals are equal temperament, just like in western music
4:01 more importantly: (traditional) Indian music does not use chord progressions, it's based on a drone with a raga on top. Raga is a scale that has a certain mood.
Yep! And not just Indian traditional music, lots of systems that predate the "western" system have a similar idea which favours rhythms and ornaments over harmony - it's really quite eye-opening when applying it to dance music which often has that droning low-frequency :D
@@DashGlitch True! Even Western traditional music is like that. Medieval music is also modal, and has a ton of droney instruments tuned to one key, like bagpipes, hurdy gurdy, flutes, you name it... the chordprogressions came along with choir voice leading where 3 or more voices created harmonies and thus 'chords' were born. Around the Renaissance / Baroque period, but even in the baroque period, the emphasis was on intertwining melodies (polyphony) they didn't think in 'chord progressions' but in melodies working together and creating harmony.
Probably not tbh, new features look great but still no match for Bitwig in my workflow. Kinda sucks that they launched C13 with almost no new noteworthy features and now C14 with some good features, now I have to pay twice to upgrade for what should have been 1 updgrage imho. Especially considering how stagnant C12 was. I'm not paying $100 a year for drip-feed, BW's upgrade plan allows you to lapse and then just pay for the latest upgrade, there's also a year of free upgrades after your initial purchase. Cubase is a bit of a rinse nowadays.
i'm sorry, but when u use delays you build chords, so dissonances appear immediately ... and, it's not anymore modal music in the way u presented in the early beginning of ur video :) try using only monophonic lines on top of a given drone, ( no delay, no release except for some tonal percs ) and u will drive in the right direction . U can very often use the perfect 5th with no problem coz it's included in most of microtonal scales i know .
You're right, although if you've tuned all the notes to a specific system then those dissonances are chosen, much like using said microtonal intervals in an arrangement. My example is to show the intervals between multiple elements in an composition, and I don't feel like anything I said was actually incorrect - perhaps maybe just not the best example to nail the point.
Never heard of him before, I'm sure it works for EDM bangers though hehe :) (sarcasm, ofcourse I know Bach! The legendary Baroque composer, Baroque movement was known for abstractions from the traditional harmony and rhythms, one could almost say taking inspiration from outside of the current "western" framework at the time)
5:41 no, not true. They tune the thing to a certain Scale. That Scale might have micro tonal adjustments to our equal tempered half tone system, but generally, the scale wont have more than 7 notes! it could be for example C C# E F G G# B as notes, and they might be a bit 'off' but its not like suddenly you got 24 notes in a scale! Misconception of eastern music.... Santur, saz, sitar etc all tuned to certain scales. Always in tune with the harmonic series to make it shine and simmer.
I may have conflated a few ideas into one, perhaps confusing Indian music system with Persian or something else which does use tone systems outside of 12, sorry for the misinterpretation! I'm sure they do exist, just not in Indian music system. I'm also talking about the divisions per octave in certain systems, rather than amount of notes in a specific mode, but yea may have said scale instead - apologies
@@DashGlitch i meant to say: they dont use 24 different tones or more in a piece of music. they use max 7, and yeh maybe some bends here and there that make it more ;) but so did Jimmy Hendrix ;) PS not trying to bust your balls here!
Ummm I think you should delete this it’s soooo wrong Sooo much of western music across ALL genres can be considered modal. What do you think any track based around Am, Em, Dm ? All modes. And (revelation) they are all using notes of the C Ionian….. You weren’t aware how much goa was produced in Phrygian?
I didn't say it's not found in "western" music, rather that there are traditions that predate it, and of course inspired it. I am well aware of Phrygian, I use it a lot and have done plenty of videos about it (see the one I literally mentioned at the beginning). I'm talking more about the focus on chords and functional harmony in "western" music, not chosen scales.
Yeah I have realized that a lot of people trying to get into techno production struggle with that. They tend to use rely on functionnal harmony too much and the "techno" feeling gets lost. I guess thats also true for Electro, IDM, ambient and a lot of other electronic music genre.
Absolutely. Functional harmony and modal compositions are two different worlds. As soon as you evoke functional harmony, it's hard to get out of that and it sets up expected patterns of tension/release from all the functional music we've all heard.
I like to use frequency masking and volume techniques. So basically if you have 2 frequencies playing, one is going to fight with the other for 3 things. Place, time and space. So for my bass i eq nothing higher than mids, for mids nothing higher than highs and lower than start of the lows, and highs nothing lower than mids, which means i cut off all extra frequencies not needed and keeping only what i need on that channel. If you EQ instruments according to their fundamental frequencies to create some space for other elements it will give you a very well balanced mix.
Then for sidechain i use an envelope follower to duck certain frequencies of the bass, you don't want to sidechain the whole bass signal, only certain frequencies. I use Ableton 12, so i put a follower on the kick and increase the gain a bit. Then i add eq eight, i use this eq to duck the frequencies i don't want present. I map the envelope follower to eq band 1(gain knob) which will be bass, set the amount on env follower to 50% and the max to 0%, this then creates a duck when the kick comes in, but only for frequencies not needed, creates space for others but you still keep the fullness of a great present bass at the same time. I usually set the frequency to around 100Hz and below, all that will be ducked. Sidechaining creates a deaf area because it eliminates most of the needed frequencies with the ones not needed. That's why you hear the coming and going effect in some mixes when listening to their sidechain. To create great music, one needs to understand frequencies and the role they play inside a mix
_Bro, your vids are awesome_
I appreciate that! Thank you
7:19 Bro, did you auto-tune that? LOL
Great video by the way! Great as always! 🙂
YES! I've had the same revelation in recent years. Despite going to music school in college, I didn't fully get the difference between functional harmony and modal harmony. But now I understand that as soon as you introduce a V > I movement, you set up functional harmony and the ear has a really hard time moving away from all the associations that brings up. Ron Miller's Modal Jazz Composition" is a great deep dive on this subject. I've also been exploring quartal harmony lately and coming up with great ideas. Quartal harmony gives you a nice palette of chords to work with that don't evoke that V > I movement at all. Plenty of videos on youtube about it. Cheers Dash!
Thank you so much! I'm not too clued up, just exploring this new world at this point. So thanks I'll look into Quartal harmony as well!
Super video mate - as someone who made psytrance since 1999 and have little to no knowledge to music theory outside having a C or D base note and just using whatever sounded right the last 25 years. but hey i am also an idiot who have no idea what i am doing - i just looooove messing around with music and make weird sounds.. keep up the good work - i rececntly made my new liveset template from one of your videos and played in - worked flawless. :)
Thank you very much for the video, very interesting and opens the mind in new directions.
Just need to see how I implement it in Cubase😆
I'm just getting into this idea, but I recently made an instrument in the grid that's just a saw going into a Sallen-Key BP 2 with a lot of resonance, and there's a merge device with a bunch of values on the left side, and the output is a modulator out that controls the cutoff of the filter. The point of this is that if you tune the values, you'll get a bunch of notes that seemed to be hidden in the oscillator, which is just droning on one note. But the notes you get by filtering are always OK, i.e. you can't go wrong with them.
I experiment alot with alternative Tuningsystems. Like 31, 19, or 24 EDO and make Techno or very experimental music with it. Its so interesting to explore new ways to create unheard chords, melodys etc.
I like to hear song! Link?
Nice. I like 17 and 21 edo :)
Solo World Synth is a plugin with sounds but the interesting thing is that it has many other scales like arabic and so on. Notes between notes is possible. It's +50 instead of +100.
Hello Dash from the Netherlands,i think this is so nice to wrap my head arround💯
🔥 This is a really insightful video. Good to raise the visibility of this approach. I always thought it was fun to hear how both middle-eastern and Celtic vocalists both sing a lot of quarter tones.
We need more music like C418's Stal where playing funny flute
very true, thanks for this video!very useful!
The vibe you brought when saying the "Other More Historical Ways of Creating Music" 12:17 was micro tonal fantastic
Once I discovered this way of thinking, all my music stopped being boring...
Same here. And I just had this thought about the ai replacing musicians topic: as soon as you for example open this tonal Pandora’s box, which really has unlimited options, that what you do with it, cannot be replicated by ai. And I think that’s THE antagonistic definition of art per se. As soon as you open up to what’s beyond your prescribed tool set, the system, the proven, the daw is you enter the world of art. Only then. That world is the only one that can reflect us. The „touring“ mirror in the chaos.
@@SnetremAip ai can already replace most mainstream music genres, in a year or two you wont be able to tell if the mainstrain shit you hear on the radio is human made or not, psytrance is a little more complex which would make it cost more time and resources and nobody is gonna spend years and millions of dollars to make ai produce complex fart sounds to excell in a niche music genre with pretty much nothing to be gained in the end, but as ai develop there will eventually come a time were it will be able to mimic even the best and most complex psytrance, and probably surpass it easily just like it did with psychedelic art and most other artforms, thats the sad truth
@ Authenticity and integrity. Creativity and inspiration. We aspire we trust. These are traits only humans can have. From my love I need that. From my food I don’t.
Don’t mix them up in your head.
@@SnetremAip sure, but does those things really matter when ai starts making better music than you and everyone else and it can do it instantly? it already happened to alot of other artforms that claims those sames values and its already happening in the psytrance scene, it would take litteral months for the best psychedelic videos creators to make videos the ai needs 10-15 seconds to create and cost 0.01% of the price, 90 % of these psychedelic music producers who claims these values and cries about ai uses ai generated videos as background for their music because its convinient for them, everyone claims integrety but they really have none, and thats the only thing out of the 4 that really matters in the end
Thanks Dash peace
Very interesting :) never did micro tunings need to check out if thats available to Ableton as well.
It's super eye (or should I say ear) opening! I'm sure Ableton can do it, I don't recall the method - I know some synths can load their own tuning files, personally I prefer DAW tools because you can fine-tune them etc, I believe there's a device similar to this "micro-pitch" in the M4L stuff, I just don't recall the name.
Live 12 now natively supports non-western scales that divide the octave in other numbers of semitones (I think Ableton calls them "scale steps" in that context) than 12. The built-in plug-ins that operate on MIDI (like the arpeggiator, the synths and MIDI effects that come with Live) then take care of the changed scale structures.
ruclips.net/video/tDR2AIUaHAE/видео.html
Have you considered using a parallel instance of a synth globally tuned 50 cents higher so when used in conjunction for say, a melody, you have an equally tempered 23-tone per octave scale instead of just 12-tone per octave available?
Not exactly that, but I've been thinking of ways of "faking" EDO systems with a pitch-wheel and modulating it by 50% in steps, this is a great idea tho thanks!
Shout out to my Goan brothers & Sisters out there!
Bom Shanker!
you should try xenharmony :)
I think the same concept applies, less "vertical" harmony, more microtones
@@DashGlitch and especially intervals that allow for completely different chords. you could find a balance between trying to write chords and not feeling restricted by the given harmonic functions of western music, but without having to come up with cents offsets that might not always solve a clear musical purpose. xenharmony solves that because the intervals are equal temperament, just like in western music
4:01 more importantly: (traditional) Indian music does not use chord progressions, it's based on a drone with a raga on top. Raga is a scale that has a certain mood.
Yep! And not just Indian traditional music, lots of systems that predate the "western" system have a similar idea which favours rhythms and ornaments over harmony - it's really quite eye-opening when applying it to dance music which often has that droning low-frequency :D
@@DashGlitch True! Even Western traditional music is like that. Medieval music is also modal, and has a ton of droney instruments tuned to one key, like bagpipes, hurdy gurdy, flutes, you name it... the chordprogressions came along with choir voice leading where 3 or more voices created harmonies and thus 'chords' were born. Around the Renaissance / Baroque period, but even in the baroque period, the emphasis was on intertwining melodies (polyphony) they didn't think in 'chord progressions' but in melodies working together and creating harmony.
cubase 14 review???
Probably not tbh, new features look great but still no match for Bitwig in my workflow. Kinda sucks that they launched C13 with almost no new noteworthy features and now C14 with some good features, now I have to pay twice to upgrade for what should have been 1 updgrage imho. Especially considering how stagnant C12 was. I'm not paying $100 a year for drip-feed, BW's upgrade plan allows you to lapse and then just pay for the latest upgrade, there's also a year of free upgrades after your initial purchase. Cubase is a bit of a rinse nowadays.
i'm sorry, but when u use delays you build chords, so dissonances appear immediately ... and, it's not anymore modal music in the way u presented in the early beginning of ur video :) try using only monophonic lines on top of a given drone, ( no delay, no release except for some tonal percs ) and u will drive in the right direction . U can very often use the perfect 5th with no problem coz it's included in most of microtonal scales i know .
You're right, although if you've tuned all the notes to a specific system then those dissonances are chosen, much like using said microtonal intervals in an arrangement. My example is to show the intervals between multiple elements in an composition, and I don't feel like anything I said was actually incorrect - perhaps maybe just not the best example to nail the point.
Check out Bach if you feel limited :D Great video anyway.
Never heard of him before, I'm sure it works for EDM bangers though hehe :) (sarcasm, ofcourse I know Bach! The legendary Baroque composer, Baroque movement was known for abstractions from the traditional harmony and rhythms, one could almost say taking inspiration from outside of the current "western" framework at the time)
@@DashGlitch :D True, Bach was pretty metal for western style music
5:41 no, not true. They tune the thing to a certain Scale. That Scale might have micro tonal adjustments to our equal tempered half tone system, but generally, the scale wont have more than 7 notes! it could be for example C C# E F G G# B as notes, and they might be a bit 'off' but its not like suddenly you got 24 notes in a scale! Misconception of eastern music.... Santur, saz, sitar etc all tuned to certain scales. Always in tune with the harmonic series to make it shine and simmer.
I may have conflated a few ideas into one, perhaps confusing Indian music system with Persian or something else which does use tone systems outside of 12, sorry for the misinterpretation! I'm sure they do exist, just not in Indian music system. I'm also talking about the divisions per octave in certain systems, rather than amount of notes in a specific mode, but yea may have said scale instead - apologies
@@DashGlitch i meant to say: they dont use 24 different tones or more in a piece of music. they use max 7, and yeh maybe some bends here and there that make it more ;) but so did Jimmy Hendrix ;) PS not trying to bust your balls here!
Fire! your onto something big...
Ummm I think you should delete this it’s soooo wrong
Sooo much of western music across ALL genres can be considered modal.
What do you think any track based around Am, Em, Dm ?
All modes.
And (revelation) they are all using notes of the C Ionian…..
You weren’t aware how much goa was produced in Phrygian?
I didn't say it's not found in "western" music, rather that there are traditions that predate it, and of course inspired it. I am well aware of Phrygian, I use it a lot and have done plenty of videos about it (see the one I literally mentioned at the beginning). I'm talking more about the focus on chords and functional harmony in "western" music, not chosen scales.
for me psytrance is about textures, morphing frequency interferences and harmonics… as in microtonal music.