Hi All,
Has anyone found a good way to have isochronic beats?
care to share an example of parameters?
I’m thinking it’s something with LFO and a step waveform
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Pretty good practical discussion of “shamanic” beats here (in the appendix): https://www.amazon.com/Cave-Cosmos-Shamanic-Encounters-Another-ebook/dp/B008IS24GY
Also look around the usual sketchy places for copies of the Monroe Institute Gateway Experience recordings.
Repetitive beats can be trippy, particularly if you’ve already developed a strong meditation practice. Much of the narrative around them is deeply mid-20th-century colonial and lacks respect for the cultures from which these practices were extracted.
The darker side to all of this is that these techniques put the listener into a highly vulnerable state where they are strongly susceptible to suggestion. Be wary and don’t sign over you life savings to sketchy hippies.
(also: they can work, they can be safe, and they can be a scam)
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As far as production techniques go, the basic “shamanic” beat is essentially a kick drum with a techno rumble. Subtle modulation is helpful so your brain doesn’t identify every beat as exactly the same.
For a wild binaural experience, generate two separate 1-second long segments of pink noise in Audacity, Paulstreatch (available inside Audacity) them each to 3600 seconds, and then hard pan one left and one right. Enjoy with headphones in a dark room as you trip your [redacted] off. Drugs optional, but not recommended for your first trip.
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This is an excellent place to start. Thank you.
Especially the details on how to make them. I’ll try to reproduce
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Yeah. A metronome.
Or put a kick on every quarter note. Or any other sound that happens at a regular interval.
Isochronic just means equal intervals. The article linked is a load of marketing nonsense to get you to buy shit.
The idea ‘isochronic tones’ is just another way of dressing something up so it seems more special than it really is. Got a straight 1 2 3 4 beat? Thats isochronic.
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yeah. metronome makes sense. my question was more about how to make it sound like music. specifically, i wanna put them into industrial techno.
So, an answer like: “use a kick drum, shorten it to …, the put lfo step with … parameters” would be the most useful and easy to try.
re article, i feel them. not from the article but other recordings. i do plan to check how people studied their effects to see if there are any parameters that weren’t controlled.
thank you
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I don’t disagree with this statement, but set and setting is remarkably powerful. Transcendental Meditation (promoted by David Lynch and other famous folks) is infamous for charging big bucks for a “custom” mantra that turns out to be exactly the same for everyone. On one hand - a huge scam. On the other hand, some people only take expensive things seriously. Tom Sawyer’s Fence, meditation edition.
If you are rolling around in a G-Wagen, then by all means feel free to drop $5-20k on gurus. If you are pulling lattes, there are much, much cheaper ways to experience these altered mental states.
DO NOT, I REPEAT DO NOT GO INTO DEBT FOR THIS STUFF.
Techno already is that. Isochronic / shamanic beats are sort of the ultimate minimal techno. Just a kick with a lot of reverb.
I’ve you’ve got an Elektron or any other x0x style box, setup a 4/4 kick like @Microtribe suggests at 120-140 bpm or so, go sit in a dark closet in a stable but comfortable position (yoga and meditation guides are very helpful here) and listen for 10-20 minutes. It can be helpful to visualize yourself sitting in an Apollo capsule about to blast off to the moon. Or you can imagine you are waiting for a subway that you will jump onto as it rushes past.
There isn’t really any science here at all. We lack the ability to image the brain with sufficient resolution.
Or just go to a good techno club and dance your butt off.
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Ableton tutorial:
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Here are technical/process bits.
For the shamanic aspects, literally ignore all the frauds and narcissists out there and develop your own path while recording.
Figure out what tickles your brain and build on that.
Just as my early soc/ant classes taught me, anyone can place themselves into a trance state. Once you can enter that mindset with your beats, you can work on refining your own process.
To go in a slightly different direction, I’ve been focusing on this stuff and charismatic leaders lately for a track and found some interesting parallels in https://online.berklee.edu/store/product?product_id=11127 which focuses more on voice and lyrical scansion but gives you an idea of how to change stressed/accented rhythm and alternate expectations, subvert them, confuse and deceive to stress points of an idea.
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I’ve been enjoying “Decoding the Gurus” podcast lately in researching for that track, and ala dril’s evergreen tweet, it is hard not to “give it to them” [gurus] when it comes to the very impressive ability to “improv” complete gibberish in a manner that can be hypnotic and destroy someone’s defenses in accepting suggestions all without saying much of interest but with such heightened drama and grandiosity that a person is flooded with powerful feelings, all through remote parasocial. It’s really so close to improvisational jazz with poetry and tenuous balance between consonance and dissonance.
I have such a love-hate relationship, I just wish some of these orators known for their charisma and influence did something slightly different with their talents 
I hope to one day better understand techniques of attention, excitement, emotion, and how they can be wielded through rhythm and flow for purpose of performance and (more honestly) spotlighting/punctuating my own ideas.
Anyway, not to detract too much from the original topic but “stupid human tricks” are essential to good hypnotic techno so these techniques can absolutely cross disciplines.
Appreciate your references!
The big thing with me in delving into the neoshamanists is that self-awareness and identity helps, understanding of authoritarians, narcissistic patterns (and family structures.) The people I know most fascinated with these topics that aren’t sucked in have a very strong identity built by and for themselves, (often non-neurotypical, but maybe that’s just the people who want to talk to me about culty fixations!)
Subbing to the thread, should be fun to build on when it comes to techniques.
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Bob Wilson, of Illuminatus! fame can provide good grounding, particularly his Reality Tunnels discourses.
On the other hand, The Trickster and the Paranormal argues that debunkers can actually support and strengthen the woo by their very debunking attempts.
Sweet Anticipation is somewhere on my bookshelf, waiting for me to get more than 10 pages in. As is Zen and the Brain.
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I did meet the amazing Randi and his partner a few times at the JREF 
I’ll check it out!
I am fairly conscious of what engagement with unreality can be and the nuances there.
I’m a big ol’ RAW fan, will also check this out. Also unsurprisingly a fan of the Subgenii, but that’s a different bag of slack.
I’ll edit in some music techniques when I’m back from an event so this isn’t just literary references!
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Thanks for sparking this thread. Here’s something I made utilizing the technique and 5 instances of Arturia MiniFreak V VST:
23 skidoo👊🏼™️
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I think I’ve mentioned this elsewhere here, but KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money is a good and fun read.
Gold star to the first person who complains that I started out by urging people to not spend money and ended up recommending a surprising number of books. 
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The only book one needs to read is Prometheus Rising.
Everything in life falls into place after that read.
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As others have said pretty easy to create your own, I’ve dabbled with this kind of thing for years now, with results from mild irritation to almost ecstatic elation to what felt an almost profound connection to something.
But yeah there is a lot of BS and expensive courses and products about, avoid all that and make your own, for me the best results were when combined with synchronous lights.
To create them quite easily you can use free tools such as audacity or gnaural, or use a drone with an LFO modulating amplitude.
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Eyes so chronic
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Another fun thing to do is just make literally any random one bar long pattern and play it for 10 minutes or so.
Pay attention and you will notice it going from kind of uncomfortable and weird, to listenable, to a sick beat that you have started dancing to.
repetition is power
repetition is power
repetition is power
repetition is power
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I will through sheer force of will refrain from posting libgen links to each.
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