Sound Portfolio

So, you’ve heard trance, you like the style, and now you want more…  Now you want to know how to MAKE trance!  This guide gives you a crash course in the basic structure and elements of a trance track...

(download the FlStudio Project File for this tutorial)

Granted, there is no such thing as a correct formula for any kind of music, music is constantly evolving and while there are certain structures, such as “trance”, it pays to know how to interpret the structure into your own artistic vision.  Ultimately, this guide should be used simply as a starting point for beginners who are totally lost, or amateurs who can work their studio but haven’t done trance before.

This tutorial uses FLStudio for examples however you can adapt the principles to other software or hardware sequencers if you like.  I will provide audio samples and screenshots along the way to demonstrate various concepts, and hopefully present a good basic understanding of how to write an average trance track.

Before going to far, it’s important to realize that creating music is just as much about the gaps between sounds as the sounds themselves.  New composers often try to fill in every gap with some kind of noise.  The end result is a wall of sound.  This is good, if it’s the type of sound you are aiming for – but for me, I prefer to play with the gaps, to create interesting textures and spaces in the music for the listener to wander around in.  It all depends on your style and what you’re aiming for.  The kind of trance I like is the kind that gives a good melody to entrain the mind, without too many distractions.

In other words, keep it simple.

Trance listeners are accustomed to having to deal with only a few well defined layers, such as a solid beat, a pumping bassline, and a soulful melody (for some genre’s of trance at least).  There is some room for ambience and effects, but be careful not to overdo it.  Become acquainted with your spectrum analyzer, it will show you things your ears might not be able to pick up.  You will see where the sounds are beginning to overlap and interfere with each other, which is something compressors can’t hide.

To help combat this, filter everything into its dominant frequency range, and if two sounds are colliding, either lose one of them or if you really like them both, consider moving one of the sounds to a lower octave or a different harmonic.

Again, there are no hard and fast rules, ultimately if it sounds good you’ve done well.  If you can’t quite get it right, just keep practicing.

Getting Started
This is the hard part or the easy part, depending on your skill.  Also, there is no correct starting point.  Depending on what you are aiming for, you can start with a bassline, a melody or a beat.  Often the starting point will determine the direction the entire tune will go…  If you start developing the melody first, you are more likely to end up with a more melody driven tune, with the bassline and rhythmic sections providing support.  If you start with a solid beat and work from there, often the track ends up being very beat-driven with a basic supporting melody.  Sometimes, whatever you started with doesn’t even end up appearing in the finished track.  Whatever you decide, it’s important to start somewhere.

For this demonstration, I decided to open the 3xOsc to see if I could make any interesting sounds.  I haven’t used the 3xOsc for a long time, favoring my collection of VST’s and soundbanks, but the 3xOsc is really quite a powerful generator for creating effects, plucked-sounding instruments, piano sounds and organs.  Also, everyone who owns FLStudio will have it, so nobody will feel left out if I use it here.

Ok, So I played with 3xOsc for a bit, and added a long reverb effect, and came up with this sound.

As you can hear, it’s pretty basic, but it has potential… I then used the equalizer to filter out any stray frequencies in the sound without losing its character

Then I played around with some different melodies, to come up with this, which I think is nice.  Basic, but nice.

As you can see from the above image, the melody is 8 bars in length, which leads me to an important feature of trance…  You should be able to divide 64 evenly by the length of your melody.  Pop a trance track in your CD player, and start counting the beats.  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7…… 64.  On the 64th beat, you will quite often notice a change…  A new element is added, a cymbal is struck, or some other event occurs.  You may also hear minor variations on the 32nd beat.

What’s with all the math’s?
Well for starters, Trance exploded and gained popularity via the club DJ scene.  The job of a DJ is twofold…  Get two records spinning simultaneously at the same BPM, and make sure that the tracks being played blend seamlessly together.  It would be challenging for a DJ to mix two tracks if there was no structure to the music, hence the reason that trance is so structured.  It makes the DJ’s life easier to know that after counting 64 beats, an expected change will occur.

As an aside, there is the ethical issue that a musician shouldn’t be forced so rigidly into a convention, freedom of expression and all that.  Yes, true.  But to counter that, trance-lovers are subconsciously programmed to accept the sound structure of the format, and whether they know it or not, a trance track that doesn’t count it’s beats properly just sound’s wrong.  In general.  There are exceptions of course, and again it all depends on why you are writing the track, and whether you care about these conventions or not.

Ethics aside, 64 beats then a change is the format I’ll be presenting in this tutorial, for the sake of simplicity.  And what this brings us down to is having to create our melodies and rhythms so they can repeat evenly 64 beats.

Adding the Beats.
To demonstrate the maths, I’ve loaded the FPC with one of the preset dance loops, put down 64 beats in the play list, and added the melody from above.

Sounds pretty boring after a while, doesn’t it?  There’s plenty of things to do from here, you could refine the beat, add a baseline, or a complementary melody…  However the image shows the relationship between the looping melody and the number of beats before a “change”.  There are 16 bars, each with 4 beats, making a total of 64 beats.  The melody loops perfectly twice.  We’ll get back to “the change” soon…

But first, I cheated on the beat.  FPC comes with a great range of presets, and if you’re after quick – n – nasty, presets are fine.  But if you want an understanding of how the trance beat works at a basic level, or if you don’t have FPC, here’s a quick run-down.

In FlStudio, go to File, Templates, Club Basic, to load a basic club drumkit.  Then, draw the following pattern:

Pretty basic, but it gives an idea of the simple structure of a trance beat.  The prominent feature is the kick drum, the hi-hat and the snare.  Often a hand-clap is used in place of a snare.  As you can see, the beat bounces up and down between the snare and the kick, and the kick and the hi-hats.  That’s what gives the trance beat it’s energy and drive, and there is an infinity of variations that all work around this basic structure. 

Kick – hat – Snare – hat – Kick – hat - Snare – Hat

Play around, try layering multiple samples at once, such as a kick, a clap and a hat.  You will often find that the most aggressively phat sounding trance tunes have a kick drum that packs an amount of higher frequency "punch" to complement the low end, and this is often achieved by combining a snare, clap or even a burst of high frequency white noise into the mix.  There’s also wave-shaping and overdrive effects that can achieve interesting results.

I’ll leave such experimentation up to you and your free time.  For now, I’ll return to the original project and content myself with the FPC.

Time to Bring Back the Bass
It’s time to make it more interesting.  The tune is severely lacking a bassline…  So lets add one!

The stereotypical trance bassline occurs halfway between each kick.  Kind of like this.

And it’s not too bad, for a demonstration.  But it still sounds ordinary, what else can we add?

Well, for starters we can jazz the bassline up a little.  Often in trance and various other dance genres, the bassline will be supported by an identical but higher frequency instrument, to make it more seem prominent.  Here I’ve added a Sytrus Synth Bass following the same pattern as the original bassline.  I’ve repeated the bassline in higher and lower octaves to make it seem slightly stuttered, and added automation.

Already, with a small amount of automation, the tune begins to feel like it’s moving somewhere:

But… notice how the original melody seems out of place?  Well, it is now, so lets remove it from the play list.  We won’t delete it – we’ll need it in a later part of the song.  With the melody gone, we’re left with:

Adding a lead.
Hmm, now it’s a bit empty up in the midrange to high frequencies, and to be honest, the song never had a decent lead…  So we should think about something to fill in that gap.  I feel like adding an Arpeggio Synth.  These are classic trance material.  Cheating again, I’ve used the Euroarp patch in Sytrus to provide the lead.  Play around until you can find a tune that fits the rest of the song, then do some automation…  I’ve also added some hall reverb to make the lead seem to take up more space…  something like this:

Putting it all together, Part 1:
So we now have: A beat, a bassline (in two separate parts), a melody and a lead.

All that’s left is to experiment with various sequences to see how it fits together. 

This is one possible combination:

This tune took 2 hours to make, including writing this tutorial, so it is inclined to be very simple.  The beats are the same tick-tock all the way through, there is no variation in key, nor does the bassline ever vary.  However, all the elements are there…

All the elements, except…

The Buildup!
Trance aint trance without a buildup sequence.  That’s where the beat stops, everything goes slow… then from silence a great crescendo of snares and rising scales introduces the next 64 beat segment of the tune.

You could do a simple snare roll, like this… (I added a phaser for effect)

Or, for twice the fun, double the length of the buildup…  A simple snare roll isn’t nearly as uplifting and trance inducing as a snare roll followed by another chill-down and a second, even more bombastic buildup that drops into the fattest beats ever, right?

Henceforth I shall add one…



The end? (Putting it all together Part 2)
Here’s the final product of this tutorial:

It’s a start.  One big improvement would be to work on the beats some more.  Generally there is a variation in the beat every 64, and at the end of each 16 or 32 some kind of skip-jump in the beat, to break it up a little.

Also, we could add some kind of introduction, and a key shift or two in the arp lead.

In summary:

1. Keep it simple.  Don't try to do too much all at once.
2. Keep the DJ happy.  Write the segments in 64 beat blocks.
3. Tempo varies between diffent dance genres.  House starts at around 120Bpm, through to around 135-146 for general trance, and even faster for hardcore and psi-trance genres.  (Thanks DavidD for picking this one up)
4. Make sure you use an equalizer to put each instrument in its own frequency band.
5. Play around.  Try crazy stuff.  Experiment and learn.

(download the FlStudio Project File for this tutorial)

>>>Go to Part 2 of the Trance Tutorial