Make an Effective Psy-Trance Vocal Buildup

Psychedelic Trance, or Psy-Trance, is a sub-genre of electronic music best known for its heavy synth sequences, basslines, and drum grooves. Aside from that, the production of Psy-Trance is heavily influenced by audio effects, ranging from pitch-bending, Reverb and delay tricks, filter sweeps, buildups, and so on. These types of effect processing make Psy-Trance unique. Along those lines, vocals are just another audio source you can alter in unusual ways. The following tutorial will show you one such technique: a vocal buildup. We will start with a previously made sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW, which contains all the elements required for a whole mix of a decent Psy-Trance track. Let's start by listening to it.

~Full Mix - Without Vocal

Now, we will process the vocal in a unique way, which will transform it into an uplifter. First, let's listen to it without any effects.

~Vocal - Unprocessed

Now, we will use an effect that is essentially a time stretcher. I  also incorporate additional possibilities regarding pitch shifting, but we will get to that soon. On the vocal channel, we will add a Guitar Rig 5 by Native Instruments. U der Components, in the Pitch section, we will select the Transpose Stretch effect and drag/drop it on the right side of the interface.

The Parameters

As you can see, the Transpose Stretch effect contains just a few parameters to control, but they are effective. The first parameter in the row is the Dry/Wet, which controls the amount of affected signal. B low is the On button, which engages the effect. Next to it, there is a Stretch knob. The more we move the knob to the right, the more time is stretched until the signal comes to a complete stop on a Single Grain. The audio passes through without being looped when the stretch is in the left position. The Grain knob works only when the GRAIN button below is enabled, and it controls the size of the grains. Otherwise, the grain size is automatically linked internally for the best overall pitching. The Key knob controls the pitch of the grains. The center position is neutral and plays the grains at the original pitch. You move the knob to the right; the grains are pitched up to 1 octave. To the left, the grains are pitched down to -5 octaves. Lastly, the 2 BAR button makes 2 bars of input to be processed, as opposed to 1 bar.

Making the Buildup

After briefly introducing the parameters, let's move to some practical examples. In order to process our vocal with Transpose Stretch, we will automate the ON button, the Grain size, and the Key, which controls the pitch of the grains, as mentioned above. We can set the Stretch parameter to maximum. The automation lanes in the picture below show the following: We engage the On button just a little bit after the start of the vocal sequence. We gradually increase The Grain Size when the On button creates the buildup effect. And the Key value we shift to the negative end to spice things up. Let's listen to it.

~Vocal - Processed With Transpose Stretch

The last touch on the processed vocal would be to add a bit of Reverb towards the end. This will create a reverb tail, blending nicely when the drop hits.

~Vocal - Processed With Transpose Stretch + Reverb

Finally, let's listen to the processed vocal and other elements in the mix.

~Full Mix - With Processed Vocal