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What's Psycle? A short introduction...
Psycle is a "modular music creation studio" as it says in the splash screen. This means, you can use virtual Instruments and effects and combine them in a modular way. With psycle it is easy to create all types of electronic music, but psycle is not limited to electronic music. Pre-recorded tracks (a vocal track and a guitar track for example) can be inserted as well.
Some Demo songs can be downloaded from the community website: Demosongs at psycle.pastnotecut.org
Psycle supports the VST2 instruments and effects as well as native Psycle instruments and effects. A screenshot of an example effect chain in Psycle is shown below:
The "Instruments" or "Sound Generators" are the blue boxes. The arrows determine the way of the sound signal, routed through several effects (the green boxes), which are eventually routed into the "Master"-box, the sound output. Both the blue as well as the green boxes can represent a VSTi or VST or a native instrument/effect of Psycle and are called "Machines".
The information for the Generators, when to produce sound, is stored in patterns, which can represent one or more measures of musical information. A pattern has several tracks. On the picture below you can see an example pattern:
Each vertical column in the picture represents one track. Up to 64 Tracks are possible. Each filled cell in a track is an event like "Play note C-4 on the Bass-Synthesizer-Instrument" or "Raise the reverb on drums". To fill in the information in the tracks you can use the keyboard as well as Midi-devices. This notation system may seem unusual compared to the common staves-system but allows a perfect control over even the smallest sound changes.
For those, who know what "Trackers" are: Psycle is a music tracker, in the spirit of the old FastTracker, Impulse Tracker ... But psycle is more than those sample-based oldies, Psycle is combined with latest technologies: virtual synthesis, modularity, ...