How to make WAIO style psytrance leads and transitions
WAIO style psytrance leads are one of the signature sounds of the legendary Brazilian-born Psytrance producer.
WAIO needs no introduction to lovers of the genre so let’s create one of his signature style leads and transition effects.
WAIO’s deep and immersive sound makes great use of transitions, his style has an incredible flow to it that is hard to pull-off without a lot of fine-tuning, however there are a few key aspects that stand out throughout his works. Without diving too deeply into the sound design side of things, it’s evident that WAIO makes use of a lot of delay and reverb effects.
One technique in particular that stood out for me, something I have actually been using for some time since first discovering it, is creating an emulated delay effect by chopping up a sampled version of a synth loop and applying various effects. This is an awesome technique because it gives you control over what sound is being heard, while still maintaining somewhat of a delay style effect.
To show how it’s done, we quickly created a simple arpeggiated lead patch in Spire, just a “classic” sawtooth, with some filter, drive and some effects. Then we render it out as a loop and chop it up and add effects.
So let’s make it sound more like an echo…
Once you’ve chopped up the loop and recreated your own echo effect, a filter effect can help to bolster the sound of a delay, specifically if you automate it downward slowly over time. Then using a delay plugin with a low mix setting, we’re able to add that slight colouration that a delay would usually add to the tails of the sound. I decided to go with u-He’s new Colour Copy plugin, because the focus of the plugin is on the colouration, and it certainly did the trick.
Furthermore, I added a reverb alongside the Wider plugin just to touch up the sound, keep in mind that it helps to group these lead channels together, so when you apply effects, all of the sounds will have those effect applied.
Here’s the walkthrough video on how to create WAIO style psytrance leads and transitions, in case the explanation was too vague:
