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Structure of Trance Form

I'm looking for information about how to construct a Trance song (any sub-genre), generally.

Are there not basic, general ideas about what a Trance anthem is made of (at least as a starting point for a newbie)? I'm looking for a description of each of the sections and what they are (like intro, first body, first drop, etc. -- what are those sections called and how long are they generally?). I know it's subjective, and subject to a great deal of license and leeway, but I need a starting point to work from.

I bought the Dance Music Production Manual, but the information he gives about how to put it all together doesn't seem to match the songs that any of the big names are putting out; neither in structure, sequence, or length. So I'm a little confused.

My background is in 17th and 18th Century European Classical Music, I have a Bachelor's in Music Theory and Composition (which means I know how to think really deep musical thoughts about being unemployed), and of course none of that is of much use in creating dance music.

I'm using FL Studio 8 Producer Edition, not that it makes a difference really.

I'm sure this is a real noob question, so if anyone would be cool enough to take a minute and either break it down for me, or point me in the direction of the info I need, I'd owe ya' big time.

Thanks

Dragon

Hahaha this topic rings a bell.

You'l just have to listen to big anthem trance songs and try to recreate your own take on the techniques they use.
The pros out there have been doing this shit for ages! Practise.

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I'm looking for a description of each of the sections and what they are (like intro, first body, first drop, etc. -- what are those sections called and how long are they generally?).

Seriously man you need to listen to sum tracks. But as a general rule if you want stuff released on lables then 8.1/2mins is prolly about maximum length for a track. I think about a minute of pretty plain intro beat is good for djing before anything really gets going. DJ Friendly. Those are handy guidelines but before peeps jump on this and disagree there are of course no hard fast rules.

ow. there are a lot of genres to trance, each of them with a lot of different approaches. I understand you want to grasp the theory of the structure for trance, but that will be hard.

There is a general idea to trance/EDM however, thats a little different to other genres. It is the idea of building up and building down, these ups and downs are making it suitable for a dance floor.

So if you want something to start with, here is a basic trance track structure. theartfulducker probably gave the best hint already, you should analyze professional tracks how they are built up, but you said you need a starting point so here goes.

You start with the basic beat, a DJ friendly start of your track. Then you add more and more elements, bass, synthlines, all one by one. When you have reached the first climax, lets say at 2-3 minutes, the track breaks down to a calm moments and you introduce your melody. The melody gets more and more intense and layered, you are building up again. The climax is where your beat starts again, joined by the main melody, lets say at 4-5 minutes. Finally, your track is building down again, you take out your elements one by one just like you built it up in the beginning.

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[i][b] You start with the basic beat, a DJ friendly start of your track. Then you add more and more elements, bass, synthlines, all one by one. When you have reached the first climax, lets say at 2-3 minutes, the track breaks down to a calm moments and you introduce your melody. The melody gets more and more intense and layered, you are building up again. The climax is where your beat starts again, joined by the main melody, lets say at 4-5 minutes. Finally, your track is building down again, you take out your elements one by one just like you built it up in the beginning.

Totally!

Add effects to your layers and test run it as many times as you need to make it sounds good to yourself

well i suck too at making trance music,but mebay be i can help u out. have u try to look at some midi trance songs that u like? this site is so cool enjoy! http://www.nonstop2k.com/community/frontpage.php

i am lol

There are really NO rules here.

It all depens on what kind of trance track you are going to make, here are three Trance tracks, with main part breakdowns colored yellow, you`ll notice the timing and length of the break is different on all of them.



Be creative, do what feels natural for you.

Listen to tracks you enjoy and try and copy them. I physically wrote out when to add drops, builds, FX and what not on a piece of paper and kept it at my desk as a rough outline of what needed to happen and when.

Practice, practice and practice. Along with google and youtube.

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Originally posted by Subtle There are really NO rules here. It all depens on what kind of trance track you are going to make, here are three Trance tracks, with main part breakdowns colored yellow, you`ll notice the timing and length of the break is different on all of them. Be creative, do what feels natural for you.

Yeah, and heaps of tracks have two breakdowns too which isn't evident from this. Its really a matter of experimenting a lot, you don't want all your tracks to have the same structure, it'll be boring.

Check this out, this should help you out.

http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/...light=structure

Thanks for the link to that thread! Pho-mo and the others gave me what I was looking for, thanks very much.

To the people who feel that following a structure is somehow "formulaic," I would just like to say one small thing.

ALL MUSIC IS FORMULAIC TO ONE DEGREE OR ANOTHER.

The true artistry comes not so much from innovation, but from exercising your creativity and artistry within the bounds of the form you are working in. You have to know what the rules are before you can go breaking them and innovating.

This is true of classical music, this is true of rock, country, hip-hop, even Balinese Cymbal Music has a form and a structure.

There is a very common term to describe music that is purely freeform and without any identifying structure: Jamming.

Nobody wants to hear you jam. People want songs. Discrete, organized units that are readily understandable and familiar.

The form and structure, especially in generalized form, is useful to teach a complete newcomer (like me, a classical musician) about the general style called Trance. I disagree strongly with the person who said "just listen to a bunch of tracks and try to copy that."

If I give you a list of ten classical piano sonatas, told you to listen to them and try to copy that, I haven't given you any real information. I've just shown you that I don't have a clue how to answer your question.

Would YOU be able to produce a sonata by just listening to dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of them? I have a four-year degree in Music Composition, and I wouldn't be able to do it like that! I would, at minimum, need to see a written copy of the scores to properly analyze them to a level where I could produce my own Sonata.

Someone said that classical music is so complex that it wasn't analogous to producing trance tracks. I disagree. The complexity of classical music is greatly simplified by the form. The less complex a piece of music, the more thorough the structure MUST be!

If you don't know that a Sonata is made of an Exposition section in the Tonic, Development section in the Dominant, and Recapitulation in the tonic, and this is what distinguishes the Classical Sonata form, then no amount of listening will teach you that.

So, again, I give my thanks and much respect for the *suggestions* about what a Trance track *might* consist of. At least now I have a very good place to start.

I do have to ask one question, though. And I will post a new thread with that.

Thanks again!

Dragon

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If I give you a list of ten classical piano sonatas, told you to listen to them and try to copy that, I haven't given you any real information. I've just shown you that I don't have a clue how to answer your question.

C'mon dnace music is hardly writing classical piano sonatas. But persoannly i would think youd have a much better chance of writng one after listening to 10 others.
IMO and expierience dance music is more about how good you are as a producer. Your better to make a simple but wicked sounding track than a more complex one thats not well produced. As you learn more production techniques these will come across in your music. No good think your guna put a wicked break down sumwhere in a track if you cant even make a wicked breakdown. Noobs think they guna come in and get some tricks and make this awesome dance music but it takes years! Years of learning different techniques and training your ears and forming your own style of compositon etc.

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C'mon dnace music is hardly writing classical piano sonatas.

Yes, it most certainly is. It is merely a matter of degree. Dance is just a different musical style. It takes the same levels of skill, artistry, and understanding to write Dance as it does any other style of music. It's only the content that varies, not the process.

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IMO and expierience dance music is more about how good you are as a producer. Your better to make a simple but wicked sounding track than a more complex one thats not well produced. As you learn more production techniques these will come across in your music. No good think your guna put a wicked break down sumwhere in a track if you cant even make a wicked breakdown.

I agree completely! And this is the point of my question.

How do you learn those production techniques, if not in a forum like this? They sure didn't teach it in the college I went to, way back in the 20th Century. I'm not able to learn them by simply listening to examples of the work. There has to be some preliminary understanding, which you clearly seem to already have and I don't. That's what I mean.

You have to start somewhere. Listening to examples of the music alone doesn't allow you to understand how the song is constructed, doesn't teach you what you need to know in order to produce in that style. After you have that knowledge, then listening to examples of the style will be very helpful. But I'm not there yet, and that's why I asked.

See, I don't even know what a "breakdown" is, so if I don't ask the question, and if someone doesn't explain to me what it is, what it does, how long it is, then I have no chance in hell of being able to produce one.

If I inferred to you that I believed that I could just walk in here, pick up a few tips, and start out-producing DJ Tiesto or PVD, then I owe you an apology. I don't think that, quite the opposite in fact.

But I want to start that years-long process now, and that's the spirit in which I ask my question.

Thanks very much for the info! I appreciate hearing everyone's opinion on this. How else does a newbie learn? ;-D

No you wont get them in a forum like this.
For me the most usefull and eye opening thing was to start watching a good producer work. Taught me endless shit i could never had even thort of.
Also you can go to school and learn production. This will teach you fkn heaps! But usually not aimed at EDM so much.

It seems to me that you have no idea what Trance is, and its just something you chose as something you want to make.

The only way you are going to learn to make trance is to listen to trance, there simply are NO rules at all, except an percussive intro and outro for the DJ, tempo between 125-150, 4/4 time signature and the track must be arranged in chunks of 8 and 8 Bars.

As for breakdown, its not required at all, it all depends on what idea you have for the track. One idea might sound best with a 3 minute long breakdown, and another idea might sound better with a break for 15 seconds.

As you see in the visual examples i posted above, all trance tracks with different ideas.

So simply put, learn by listening and adapt ideas from other tracks and use what sounds you like and ditch those you dont like, a guy making trance has heard many thousand of different tracks, and if you havent heard as much as a couple, you are far behind on your artistic vision.

Umm, okay...

I have been listening to Trance for years.

That doesn't mean I understand what I'm hearing. It sounds like minimally ordered chaos to me BECAUSE I don't know the sections and what they do (well, I didn't before Pho-mo broke it down for me.)

Yeah, I can say "Ooh, that sounds wicked" all day long, but that won't help me understand the form enough to create my own.

You can show me examples of breakdowns, but that doesn't *tell me what one is* or how to construct one.

You said there are no rules, and then you proceeded to tell me five of them. If there truly were no rules, then how would you know it was Trance you were hearing? If there are no rules, then why doesn't Trance sound like Bluegrass? Of course there are rules, very distinct ones, even if you don't know them consciously.

If you listened to hundreds of piano sonatas, would you then be able to go in and identify the Development section? Would you be able to explain to someone what the Recapitulation does and how it relates to the Exposition? How does the Development relate to the central theme of the Exposition? Then would you be able to write a sonata because you listened to so many?

Of course not.

I appreciate that you don't know how you know what you know about this. I appreciate that you think it should be sufficient just to listen to some music and then turn around and crank some out. That may be, in fact, exactly what YOU DO.

Btw, how big is YOUR audience for the music you create?

Here you go:

Write the track in a minor key, preferably A Minor or E Minor since that's what lots of people use.

Your intro will be 128 measures long.

Add a new sound every 8 or 16 measures.

For the intro, you'll mostly be adding new percussion sounds at first -- hi hats, snare or clap, random nondescript unpitched sounds, etc.

After around 32 measures, start to introduce a few melodic sounds (some arpeggios are good) or maybe a light pad.

Then at 61 measures, leave out the kick for four measures and do some kind of noise-buildup thing to generate a little tension.

When the 64th measure has passed (i.e. at the 65th measure), bring the kick back in and introduce the bassline.

Somewhere between measure 64 and measure 128, you'll introduce your "lead." Your "lead" will be a sound called the "supersaw." A supersaw is made by detuning seven sawtooth waves slightly different from one another so that you get a big kind of "airy" sound. When you first introduce the supersaw, the filter cutoff should be low.

When measure 128 has finished, you cut out all or most of the percussion and also most of the melodic sounds. This is called the "breakdown." At this point you'll probably want to put in a big pad sound, which will also be a supersaw. You might put in a soft "aah" choirish sound as well. While this is happening, the filter cutoff on your pad and lead sounds should be low. As the breakdown progresses, you should raise the filter cutoff gradually while repeating your main melody (anthem) over and over again.

How long the breakdown goes on for is up to you, but in order to make an epic anthem track you must make the breakdown at least one minute long. Preferably two to three minutes so your track will seem really "epic" indeed.

And if you want your track to be even more epic, you can add some strings (open up Spectrasonics Atmosphere, voila!) and play a sentimental chord progression with some huge open position chords.

After the breakdown, you should keep your lead playing at full force for at least 32 measures. After that, add another melodic sound or two for good measure. At some point you'll also need another breakdown, probably a little shorter than the first; but The Official SuperEpicTranceOMGCh00n Experts disagree on precisely what you should do after the first breakdown.

And there you have it! Your introduction to anthem trance.

THANK YOU!!!!

That was a very lucid, explicit description.

I think that's a great starting point.

So a breakdown is literally a "breaking down of the track" down to one or two elements? Is that really all it means?

Is that what is also meant by a "drop"?

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Originally posted by dragontrance So a breakdown is literally a "breaking down of the track" down to one or two elements? Is that really all it means?

Yes, pretty much; usually melodic elements rather than percussive ones.

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Is that what is also meant by a "drop"?

What people call a "drop" is shorter than a breakdown and usually involves less dramatic changes. What I described above happening at the 61st measure (the four measures where the kick is left out but everything else stays) could be considered a "drop."

Of course, there isn't necessarily a really clear boundary where a "drop" becomes a "breakdown." But the above description is how I generally use the term.

Thanks!!

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