The Anatomy of Psytrance Music w/ Talamasca

Nobody is better than Talamasca with harmonies and melodies in psytrance music! We are happy to invite you to a unique, interesting webinar with Cedric Dassulle as a teacher.

During this webinar, Talamasca will compare the structure of a psytrance track with the anatomy of a human body: skeleton, muscles, nerves and tendons. All these elements can be found in any track: music is the muscular architecture and shape of the body, while the skin and “accessories” are the effects, transitions and filters.

Let’s go through the anatomy of psytrance music together!

Topics that will be covered

1. Start a track. The basic DNA
   Just as the DNA that represents yourself, we can consider the existence of the DNA in a track. What scale are we going to use? What atmosphere do we want? Do we have an idea already or we want to go with the flow? The BPM.
2. Build the Spine: The BASE of the track
   We will cover the real start of a track, a bar with:
   — The kick,
   — The bass,
   — The basic rhythm (close hihats, open hihats, snares or claps)
   This is the main musical idea of the track. We will go to the end of the track, just to find its direction.
3. Building a Skeleton
   Now that we have our main idea and that we know more or less the final length of the track, we will start building an empty track and putting every bone into place, so that we will have an idea about the length of each part even if we still have empty ones.
4. Organs, veins, tendons
   In this part, we will focus more on filling the empty parts - Not the ones with the main theme. We will speak about delays, reverbs, flangers etc, in order to have a specific idea for each part for it to sound full even if we only have a few sounds into place.
5. Gain muscles!
   We will focus on leads, multiple layers for the same sequence, and micro modulation for the leads or side chains so that they won't sound flat.
6. Connect all parts and put the Skin on
   The skin is what will level out the track and give it its own colour. We will focus on transitions between musical parts and the general mix.
7. The accessories
   Even if you have an amazingly beautiful body, you rarely go outside naked. It’s the same for the track! Now we have a final version of our track, but we need proper clothes to put on and go out into the wild world. This means we will focus on all the little details, reverse sounds and audio filtering on all the tracks.
8. Haircut
   Finally, now that we’ve made a proper track, it will need a clean haircut for the first date with its audience. We will go through some basic notions of mastering.
9. Go OUT!
   You are ready to send out your music. How to not make mistakes, that will result in the labels not even listening to your music? We will speak part of the job which is today musicians duty: image and marketing.

Talamasca (Dacru Records)

Talamasca is the solo project of Cedric Dassulle, who began djing under the name Lestat back in 1992. In 1996, he decided to make his own project, which saw its first releases on an Israeli label called “Krembo Records”, and Talamasca was born. With the big success of his music, Talamasca suddenly started playing much more live acts than dj sets and began to be considered as one of the leaders in the international trance scene.

In 1998 he had a hand in the creation of 3D Vision, which quickly became one of the leading psytrance labels. Later on he started his own label Mind Control Records, but after a few years later he finally found his home at belgian label Dacru records.

Nowadays, Talamasca is one of the most requested live acts in all big events and festivals around the world. He has performed in almost every country thinkable that has at least a small psytrance scene. In his discography, we can find an impressive list of remixes, eps, compilation releases and no less than 12 full albums!

• Talamasca Soundcloud
• Darkru Records