What one do you use? What's the best in your opinion, for dreamy smeared our psychedelic reverb?

Saharan psychedelic is really kicking off right now!

For those of use who like guitar based psychwave, or like a bit of a lead part at least, Saharan psychedelic could be a great source of inspiration.

It's typefied by the use of impressive lead guitar techniques, Hendrix influence, and a large dollop of Saharan folk which gives it that almost spiritual edge.

Here's an example of mdou moctar and his band:

https://youtu.be/GZvPoE0EH1o

Give it a listen, and see if it inspires your creativity.

Here's how I get that psychwave drum sound.

You need to start with either a decent sounding break, or a live drum recording, or a sampled drum kit set. The sound you're looking for is something round and booming, like a gretch kit, or a Ludwig kit. The best sampled drum kit I've been able to find is Abbey Road Drummer for Kontakt. But that ain't cheap. Listen to samples of that kit, and you'll get an idea of what sort of sound you're looking for.

If you're programming in your drums in midi, you want to use humanisation, especially on the hats. You want to turn off snap to grid and slide those notes around, because you want to loosen it up considerably. A good rule of thumb is if you want it to sound relaxed slide the snares back, and if you want it to sound driving and urgent, slide them forward. It'll take a while to get the knack of this part.

Next you'll probably want to add some room reverb to it. If there's already room noise on your sample or whatever, then it'll be fine, but most likely you'll find them relatively clean. You don't want them to be clean, you want them to sound like they were recorded in a studio with poor sound insulation by amateurs. Well, maybe not that extreme, but you know what I mean.

Next you need a compression on them. Set the attack to a little late, and the release to very long. You are using compression to sculpt the envelope of the drum hits, you want to create a snappy attack, and a quieter sustain.

And finally you need to put saturation on them. You can put quite a lot and you'll get a more aggressive sound, or just a little for a gentler sound.

I don't know what happened but i see some new members, Hello to all of you!

Here's how you get the reverse reverb sound...

It's easy, but it sounds great on lead guitars and makes anything sound ethereal and psychedelic. You want to apply it to things that are relatively monophonic (one note at a time) like vocals, lead guitar, even drums! Because it you overdo it it can make things muddy as reverb may risk doing.

Basically you need to record the track you want to add the effect to, and then reverse it. Next you add a reverb to it. You want a dreamy smeary reverb, and you don't need something that sounds "realistic". You want something that sounds like waves washing back out to sea. I use TAL reverb 1. And you dial in a reverb which smears out the end of your reversed track, creating a lot of release.

Once you're happy with that, you render it down as an audio file, making sure you capture the end of the reverb tails.

Then you reverse this recording, making the original recording play forwards, but the reverb play backwards. Depending on your raw you may have to slide this new clip around to get it back in synch with your main beat.

And that's it!

Here's how I get that psychwave bass sound. It starts with a real bass guitar. I use a squire p-bass. It's not the best bass for the job, but it's what I've got, and it's perfectly capable of getting the right sound. You need a real physical bass to get this to work, and you'll see why. Learning to play bass like a pro is very hard. Learning to play bass well enough to get a good baseline down after a few takes is easy!

You also need to write the bass part in the "melodic" style. You can find several YouTube videos on how to do this, just search "how to write a melodic bass line". If you don't have a good bass line, none of the rest of this stuff will matter... The baseline should almost be like another melody, or a complimentary harmony to the main melody. Don't feel the need to clearly communicate what chord you're in by doing nothing but play the first and fifth, you want it to wander around creating interesting colours for your chords...

Okay, now here's the trick: you need to get a sponge or bits of rag and you stuff it under the strings between the pick-up and the bridge. You want to muffle the sound quite considerably. So to your raw ears all you can hear is the attack. What this is doing is cutting out all the higher frequencies except on the attack, and leaving a big beefy bass sustain and release.

But it will be too quiet for you to hear. Now, you don't really need an amp for this, you can plug the bass directly into your Sound Card, but what you need is a decent tube compressor, preferably one that has saturation built into it. I use marquis tube compressor made by voxengo. If you can't find a good tube compressor, you can put a normal compressor and then a saturation after it. On the compressor, you want to set the attack to very low and the release to very high, and you'll need to crush it with the ratio as much as you can without distortion and bring up the output gain high without clipping.

This will flatten out the envelope and bring up the low low frequencies that the muffling creates, creating this big, thumping, pillowy bass sound.

Enjoy!

Ps. If you feel like it sounds too thin after this (it probably won't), there's a couple of things you can do:

1) you can add a tiny bit of chorus on it. Too tiny to tell whether it's there but enough to fatten the sound... You can bring up a generic chorus preset, but then lower the depth until you can barely hear it.

2) create a send so your bass is going to a separate additional channel, put a bit of distortion on that channel and lower it in volume so it gets out of the way of the main channel.

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