Imphenzia

Following some very positive feedback on the tutorial video on how I create trance music I also decided to dedicate today to make another tutorial of how I arranged the entire track Spirit Within You . This video takes a detailed look at all the sections that form the track - such as the intro, the build up, the breakdown, the culmination, and the outro. It also explains how various instruments are introduced and modified during various stages of the track. I am, by no means, saying that this is how you must make trance music - it's just at peek into how I arrange most of my tracks. When I started out making music in the 90s I found no tutorials like this and I'm hoping that this video can help some of you that are interested in making music. Right then, here is the tutorial of how to arrange a trance song / track: As usual, I use Cubase 5 and my trusted VST instruments Nexus2, VanGuard, and Sylenth1 - but this arrangement technique can be applied regardless of what software y...

Today I decided to create a tutorial based on my latest trance track " Spirit Within You ". It's a detailed look at a section of 15 measures of the track where I go through each and every instrument, what notes and chords are played, which presets are used, what VST instrument was used, etc. This should hopefully give you the foundation of percussion, bassline, melody,  filling effect - but it won't teach you how to arrange a full length track - that will come in another tutorial. Have a look at the tutorial What's in the video? The video describes the following elements: Percussion (drums) - kick, closed hihat, open hihat, claps, cymbals First bassline (rapid 1/16 notes) Second bassline  (offbeat 1/8 notes) Cluster of 5 simultaneous leads for extreme atmosphere Two trance gates for an even fuller effect Pads for more euphoria And a classic trance piano with delay end reverb First the video lets you listen to the end result. Then I solo each instrume...

Following three months of development the new Imphenzia music site has been launched to start off the new year. This time it was a total re-make from the ground up of the music site and I had to learn how to develop using JQuery in order to get the visual effects, real-time updating of pages without page reloads (using “AJAX”), and at the same time keeping the development effort to realistic proportions. During the development process I set two requirements upon myself to fulfill, 1) make the new site clean, and 2) make it very simple to use. By using JQuery and quite modern features of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) I realize that there are visitors that will experience problems with the design and functionality, namely the visitors that use old browsers or have disabled javascript. For the first time, however, I felt that it is a sacrifice for the greater good as the vast majority of visitors will benefit from a much improved experience. I also had time to reflect on the historic desig...

Another two years have past since Illusion was released and I was pleased, and somewhat surprised, as I unexpectedly decided to release "Duplicate My Soul". I should probably follow traditional marketing strategies and build up a hype well ahead of an album being released but when I have my creative periods I spontaneously do these things. At the same time I'm quite happy not to follow all the rules and I'd rather take the opportunity and take advantage when the spontaneous outbursts pay me a visit. On the 19th of March 2010 I started working on a new track under the project name "Logic Surface" (I always have random names of my tracks until they are finished and I can name them appropriately depending on their character). I nearly completed the track on the 19th but on saturday 20th March I also managed to complete it fairly early in the day. As I named the track "False Awakening" I started to add tracks released after Illusion into my winamp play...

Creating music for Imphenzia Soundtrack is great fun as it offers such a variety from my normal Imphenzia trance music. I've put together a new Youtube video to showcase the different styles: The music still targets independent game developers (indiegames) with very competitive pricing and it's royalty free ofcourse.

A while back I was approached by Adraw through Soundclick who expressed a request to remix State of Confusion. I'm always welcome to remixes so naturally I accepted the request. Some time went past where I didn't hear much about it but little did I know what was to come. The remix is now finished and will be released under Emona Records but you can already listen to the entire track on Adraw's Soundclick page for this remix. To help promote this track, I've put together a preview video that you can watch as well:

Three new Imphenzia tracks have been released (click to listen to clips: Liquid Generator , Liquid Generator [Crystal Edit] and Evolution [Extended] ). You can also check out this video teaser I posted on YouTube for the new track:   The past six months Imphenzia trance tracks have been suffering attention somewhat due to being very busy with the relaunch of Imphenzia Soundtrack . The soundtrack section is a new library of music focused mainly on rapid availability of music for independent game developers (indigamers) and custominzing the site with a fully features shopping cart with automated discount bundeling and direct download access to mp3/ogg/wav versions consumed hour upon hour of development. I've also been receiving requests to create custom music for some indiegames and which has been very exciting and fun. These tracks will be available for promotional use once the games have been released. Now that the Soundtrack site is fully functional I can focus more on Imphenzia ...

Just a quick line or two before I have to run. I've published a few full length videos on YouTube now. You can watch them here! Example:

I have registered a new account at YouTube and THIS is the new Imphenzia Music Secion . I am creating 30-second previews of most of my tracks and using the "video response" feature to other popular trance videos. By creating two "channels" at YouTube, I release full length videos and these preview clips and I plan to keep adding to these channels whenever time allows me to. I use " Animoto " to create what could be classed as something between a video and a slide show and I'm quite impressed by their engine to quickly produce quite cool clips. This is also part of my promotional drive to get Imphenzia more established in the trance world.

I've been working hard to make a new track that is more DJ-friendly than most of my other tracks and the result is the recently released " Mind Machine ". The main aim of my music have always been focused on the casual listener rather than a dance floor but I want to make sure I also cater for this market and hope to raise the awareness of some DJs about Imphenzia. So, what's Mind Machine then? Over 7 minutes of progressively building trance with a central core of melodic and euphoric trance. The track has also been released through TuneCore which means that it will eventually appear on sites like iTunes, Napster and eMusic . I hope you like this new release and please let your friends know about it =)

[caption id="attachment_84" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Girls at Godskitchen New Year Eve Party"] [/caption]I had the pleasure to visit the Godskitchen New Years Eve party at Münchenbryggeriet in southern Stockholm for a party presented by Monday Bar named Godskitchen & Polysexual New Years Eve. It featured DJs such as Simon Patterson, Mark Eteson, Russel G, Paul Thomas, Neil Navarra, Lucy Fur, Mark H, Fredrik Thernell, Christian Öhman. It was great fun and gave me plenty of inspiration for new tracks that would be more suitable for the floor.

Many many hours of hard work finally resulted in the launch of the new 2009-look for Imphenzia.com. All previous sections (music, games and soundtrack) have been united and also a new addition is the section textures which is a searchable database of textures for game makers and modellers. The new site has cross functionality between the sites and it was developed in PHP with a MySQL backend. The sections now share a common user account feature which will enable anyone who has previously purchased a track, mp3-album or registered a game to access this content at all times. Another feature is that it was designed with the ability to skin the site so it can be customized, maybe becuase you want a different look or because you want a bigger font or narrower page size etc. There is only the default skin available at the moment but now that the site is launched I may find some time to create some skins. I hope you like this new site and please feel free to give me feedback or comments. You ...

Today I youtubed 'Imphenzia' as I do sometimes just out of curiosity and I'm always happy when I find contributions to spreading the word of Imphenzia. This time around I came across two videos :) Thanks and keep using music for your youtube videos and spread the word :)

I finally got some time left over for some sequencing and I created this WARM LOOP for now - we'll see if it evolves into a full length track. Any comments on this? Boring? Good? Bad? Ugly? Nice? =) I'm trying to make up my own mind about it too.

After over a week of solid work put into the new web sites I launched up the sequencer today to see if I could get anywhere with a potential track and all I came up with was this: mp3 file . Not too happy with that and I've learned something over the years, if it doesn't click straight away and inspiration comes flowing once you start working on a track - just leave it for the time being. It isn't possible to imagine creativity and it has to come naturally. I'll close down the sequencer for tonight and head off for the gym. I'll be listening to some trance during my gym session so maybe I get some ideas there, you never know.