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I started playing with FastTracker 2 back in '96. What a long, strange trip it's been!
No, I do not play live. It's hard to play psytrance live and different people mean different things when they claim that they do play live. I some times like to connect my base guitar to my software synth emulator and play over my songs but I would never do that in public because it takes a lot of practice to substitute the square or triangle wave source of a synthesizer with a real, live, vibrating sound and get something that is pleasant to the ear.
I like GOA trance more than modern progressive / minimalistic / tech trance. This is because I find GOA gives more opportunity for actual synthesis, in the musical sense. Bright, happy sounds mix to one another and one has to put effort to follow them as they become more and more complex; it is a mind game, making trance an intelligent kind of music. Minimalism calls for dark sounds which I don't like - trance should IMO induce euphoria and happiness. Also minimalism is hard to do synthesis with, unless one is very very experienced of course!
Software synths and trackers. Sometimes vocoders. Like I said before sometimes I use my base guitar as the input signal of my software synths. I have also recorded from my spring drum once, and I plan to use my didgeridoo in the future. However the fact that I have managed to design and use a physical model of the didge in one of my older tracks fills me with an infinite sense of pride.
Some say that the rave scene is dying in the 21st century. I say that it is just taking its place in history along with classical, rock and any other genre. There is no music genre that ever dies, it just loses the focus of the mainstream, which is good in a sense because whoever follows psytrance now will have an easier time "keeping it real".