Bass and leads à la Suduaya

„Psybient is like Goa, only slower“could be a relatively authentic description, because both the crisp beat foundation and the typical sawtooth sounds with a lot of delay sound like genuine psytrance and actually differ significantly in tempo. However, there are a few more distinctive features... 1 Psytrance foundation

One obvious characteristic of Psybient is definitely the beat. While other ambient and chillout subgenres are very shallow both melodically and rhythmically, here crisp drums in 4/4 pattern and rattling basses are taken from psytrance, only at 105 BPM instead of 140. So let‘s build a bass like that right away. 1

2 Building the bass

For the sound we use our Thorn Solo. This way we’re fast: just set the Init preset to Clean LP as filter MODE, CUTOFF to 11 o‘clock, the Env 1 control to 3 o‘clock and the ENV 1 envelope all down, only decay to 15%. For the AMP envelope, we still drive VEL to 100%, so that the bass reacts to the velocity. And done. 1

3 Sequence

With the sequence for this we’re similarly quick: draw 16th notes in a one bar clip and leave only the places where the kick plays blank. For more dynamics, we also halve the velocity of the first 16th note per bar and make it a bit shorter, so that the bass foundation is a bit less massive. Done. 1

4 Lead idea?

The lead sounds are also simple, mostly a short sawtooth pluck is enough, but with lots of delay. The main focus is more on a carrying melody instead of pompous sounds. But where does the idea come from? Scales are worth a lot here! In the magazine downloads you‘ll find over 130 MIDI files from Feelyoursound.com with several scales as templates. 1

5 Scales & arpeggio

Load one of these into your DAW and copy the first block into a new clip. Use at least five of the notes to program a simple eighth-note arpeggio. Then increase the spacing between some of the notes by a 16th to make the sequence less repetitive. Then repeat the pattern over eight bars. 1

6 Cutting & lots of delay

Then we garnish the arpeggio with isolated notes an octave higher, also using the remaining notes of the scale. We then cut the eight-bar into pieces of one bar each and leave a bar break between each one. As mentioned above, we provide the lead sound with a long delay, which fills the gaps perfectly.