This is the type I listen to, but it’s more a techy psy style. Not as into the original styles as much (but I’m a biased Techno guy).
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Got it, so it’s no different than recording voice over work or bluegrass, etc. Phase relationship matters on most all recordings since it causes problems and essentially mutes tones or causes muddiness on recordings that have overlapping frequencies, which a typical whistler would not produce since they are monophonic.
It other words, no different than any other recording that is recorded well from a technical perspective.
So, back to the OP: I’d focus on having fun first, man. Figure out the technical shit as you have time but don’t allow that to hold you up.
True.
The thing with this genre though, is that it’s known for being clean, sparse, but interesting to listen to at the same time. I think it’s that crystalline precision that makes it interesting to listen to when… …altered… 
I really don’t think we need to be looking at sample or sub-sample accuracy though. Just (like you say) typical good practices, phase relationships, including the waveforms themselves. A touch of manual compensation shouldn’t be too huge task if something sounds off.
The music is sparse enough, and clear enough to where you can tell if something is muddy.
I’m still curious though whether we’re talking about actual clock drift issues that are big enough to be a problem here, or if some of the other things mentioned could be causing trouble for the OP. I’ve experienced a touch of timing issues in the past, but nothing that I’d say couldn’t be easily corralled or compensated for.
At the very least, this is an interesting conversation, and I’m looking forward to doing some experimentation.
What you say is 100% true, but phase can also be ‘abused’ in a sound design sense. I don’t mean the whooshing / flanging sound of e.g. two pads going out of phase, it’s about the initial transient of the kick drum and bass notes - the first few ms.
In relatively harder (but not hardest) psy styles, like the clip posted below - see if you can hear how the kick drum and following triplet bass notes kind of sound like a coherent click-click-click-click, in amongst the actual “normal” sounds of kick + bass notes.
This effect is created by abusing compressors and whatever other means necessary to create a very consistent sound, that induces a trance like state - so that the other cinematic sounds can create a moving picture in the frequencies above. It is difficult to appreciate the effect of this sound at low volumes, you really need a massive PA to get the full effect but it;'s a kind of energy flowing through.
This is what the OP wants to achieve, and the jitter is getting in the way (which is why psy tends to be mixed in software and is as much sound design as it is mixing).
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That comes down to esthetic IMHO, not necessarily equipment or technique limitations. I’ve listened to psy and goa since the mid '90s so I am not unfamiliar. I’m used to hearing lots of HPF and BPF.
I wouldn’t think of trying to reduce the sound of IDM to microedits. 
My point is that this sound doesn’t come from some magic understanding of phase, it’s knowing the esthetic of the genre. That is the craft.
It sounds to me like the videos he was watching are focusing on a minor detail, perhaps not the most important elements in these tracks. I kind of want to see what specific videos @Oblique was referring to.
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…yeah…back then total recall as we take it for granted these days, was impossible since daws were a backend tool driven by double digit mhz cpu’s and had by no means internal offline bounce option…a harddrive with one gb was almost two thousand bux and u had to mix in realtime in one shot from ur digital AND analog open mix session to a dat…that much is truu…while that dat tape recorder alone was also already more than a grant while no matter what still the hottest and only tool how to get it finally done…
we came a long way…
and always have an eye and an ear for details…he made it in a day at “a friends house”…
I think we’re on the same track here. That’s actually what I was getting at too, and trying to get out of the discussion. There’s the artistic portion, then there are possible technical difficulties, then you could split the technical difficulties into two parts. Clock based, and easily solved phase resets, etc. I’m just curious where the breakdown is occurring. I also do think it’s being overthought, but I can’t say that for sure.
I really think a lot of this can be fixed by ear, IF there’s not something broken going on in the OP’s setup.
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Because newbies create muddy basses, therefore they watch these tutorials -> The regular YouTube clickbait.
I dislike most tutorials (beyond functional) on YouTube. The one that I actually like is Oscar (Underdog). He does the basics, practical, and leaves it to the artist to go from there.
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It’s 145bpm and it’s a kick and 3 bass notes on every quarter of a bar. They are all very short. The time it takes the waveform to cycle means it can only cycle (psycle?) a couple of times depending on the frequency.
Being out of phase can have a huge affect on the consistency of the bass. Being consistently punchy duga duga duga is what modern full on psytrance is all about.
Synths with oscillators that can reset their phase on note on are ideal for this.
I made a few psy tracks in the early 00’s
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I would encourage you to have fun with your boxes in your little spare time instead of caring about the importance of phases
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Yeah, I was talking about jitter. I kind of thought midi drift was sort of the same thing, since the timing drifts around. Maybe I was mistaken on the terminology. But anyway, all my post above were meant to explain how I deal with jitter.
Cubase was available for Atari ST already in the 80th. I can remember 2.0 hit the market around 90ish. Sure, it was no digital AUDIO workstation, but it was still one of the most affordable able powerful sequencer out there.Its not that triggering Sounds from a Computer is a new thing…
But to add on this: MIDI Lag and Jitter was an issue on those machines too.
Also, Oblique mentioned in the begining of the thread that he uses Bitwig. I posted earlier that I prefer to extract the midi from the audio than record the midi from my machinedrum, because the jitter causes the midi to give me different timing than the recorded audio. It doesn’t really matter after they are quantized, but I just prefer this way. It can also extract exact midi for all the other drifted sounds from jitter, which can be useful. This is the patch I made to do it. It takes less than a minute to set up. You can just adjust the value and gate length to get clean midi. Like I mentioned before, I quantize that midi to 1/256. That fixes all the jitter issues. I use that midi for resampling the kick and snare, as well as sidechain sends. Again, I still have jitter on the rest of my sounds from the MD, but I can live with that.
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I do Psytrance too in my free time, and I went to all that too. At the end, I had to be honest to myself: I won’t have the time to produce a product that comes close to what people listen to on parties and festivals, nor do I have the will to go through all this beurocraty-stuff again for it.
I produce loops, sometimes tracks, listen to them, send them a few friends, sometimes load them up on Soundcloud to get no clicks at all, but I have a ton of fun with it. And on top of that: No-one ever listened to it gave a sh*t on how phases where and what this genre typically “needs”. Either myself and maybe others vibe to it, or they do not.
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Long time psytrance producer here, 15 years ago I was obsessed with getting the production of my tracks “right” and that led me to go fully ITB and ended up making the most of my first album this way.
Turns out the issue wasn’t really the hardware boxes I was using, but my mixing skills. Now I do all the creative composition, sound design and sequencing OTB. I record the stems, then do the final production touch in the DAW using audio tracks only, but for performances I keep the computer out of the loop and it still sound fine as long as the mix is good.
Example track from a friend that should speak to you: produced fully OTB with a Machinedrum, the first Electribes trio (A/R/S), a Virus C sequenced by Cubase on an old Atari computer, all mixed on an Ecler DJ mixer: Do You Mars | Elypse | Hadra Records
Sounds tight to me, even thought not “clinical” like newer Astrix/Veni Vici tracks.
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because you name people in the last sentence: I think for me it helps a lot, that I am old now, had my main Goa-time in the 90th and am way more attracted to the sounds from back then. I somehow cannot vibe that much with this “Small drop every 16th bar” thing.
Can’t you just make psytrance without any tutorials or fiddling with phasing or w/e
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That is really what i mean, the simple formularic approach makes it to clinical, some of the more expierienced producers can mitigate this, when after the mini drop s meaningful change comes, instead of the same sequence.
The genere had become very stale with this technical perfection, and that is undeserved, it needs a renewal, dirtyness combined with experimentalism.
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1000x times this.
Loads of panning with delay and sweeping HPF and BPF filters. Sample your kick. Use gated envelopes. Have fun. Nobody is going to be saying “bro, your kick is 14 degrees out of phase, you’re a failure”.
Figure out how to make tracks that move asses, if that’s your thing, and the rest will follow.
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