If Garage has been the flavour of 2000 in the UK, then there’s little doubt that Trance and Epic House has been the flavour of 2000 just about everywhere else in Europe. Hell, it’s even breaking into that last bastion of rock supremacy that is the US of A.
Before you groan, we’re not talking about that dire Eurodisco stuff that Italians and suchlike seem to churn out in their sleep. No - we’re talking about that full-on, stay on the outside for a faster ride, home grown epic stuff from people such as Mr Oakenfold.
One of the essential ingredients in Trance and Epic House is a big sound. Giant swirly pads, fat riffs, plus loads of delay and chorus settings all help give this musical genre the necessary ingredients to large it up big style.
So, in an attempt to shake off the winter blues and get geared up for another summer of reckless abandonment, this month’s Style Counsel will endeavour to endow you with a few of the necessary hints and tips in terms of creating your own epic and trance classic.
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You can see from the transport window that we’re starting with a tempo of 140 bpm which is perfect for epic house and trance music. As we’ve stated before though, because we’re working within the MIDI Domain, we can change this at any time.
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Now we’re going to define the length that we’re going to work over. For the purposes of this tutorial we’re going to cycle around four bars. You can see the selected bars by the white area on the time line at the top of the page.
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We’re going to start by programming the drum track, but first we need to find a suitable drum kit on our sound source. If your module or card conforms to General MIDI drum program changes you should find a 909 type kit at program change 30.
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Using the drum mapping within the General MIDI specification you’ll find an open hi hat at A#2 and to begin our track we’ve programmed these on each of the off beats over our four bar duration as seen here.
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We’ve recorded these in via a MIDI Keyboard so first we need to tighten up the part by judicious use of the quantise function. Our part essentially has an eighth note sensibility and we want it to sound as straight as possible so we’ve selected ‘1/8 - note’ from the quantise menu.
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Because of the metronomic nature of house or trace music we also need to adjust the velocities of our hi hat so that each beat sounds the same in terms of dynamics. Within Logic it’s easy to do this from the Transform menu as seen here.
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Okay we’ll admit that it’s not that obvious to see what to do at first, but from the transform window select the ‘velocity limiter’ parameter from the white box at the top left of the page. You’ll now see within the operations box that we have a default maximum value to 100.
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Now click on the box marked ‘max’ and select the option that says ‘fix’. Now we can define the value at which we want to fix the velocities of each note by typing in the desired amount in the window underneath. Here we have selected a value of 100.
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Now we need to process our hi hat part which we can do by simply clicking on the ‘select and operate button’. Alternatively, we can process only selected events by clicking on the ‘operate only’ button. It’s features such as this that make the transform function a powerful editing tool.
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Finally we’re going to make sure the length of each note is the same. Although this isn’t strictly necessary with drum parts as each hit is essentially a one shot sample, it does help keep our drum pattern looking neat and tidy and also helps in terms of polyphony when building a busy track.
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Reducing the length of our drum hits also has the added benefit of helping keep the polyphony high for our sound source when building a busy track. If we had loads of chords and over long drum notes etc we would soon encounter the dreaded note stealing.
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You can see here that from our transform window we’ve selected the ‘fixed note length’ option and we’ve set it to . . . 20 which is a perfect length for each drum hit to be. Any shorter and you may get some clipping. Any longer and it may affect the polyphony later.
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Next we move to the kick drum. We’re not going to program an excessively complex drum part, on the contrary, we going to program a simple but effective pattern to give us room to expand later. So here’s that mighty four to the floor kick drum part.
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Again, we need to quantise the kick drum so that it is rigidly in time and because our kick drum has an eighth note sensibility we’ve selected ‘1/8 - note’ quantise as per our open hi hat part.
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Now we’re going to go back into the transform window again and fix the velocity value of the kick drum. In this instance we’ve selected a fixed velocity of 115 so that it so that it punctuates the pattern with the right amount of impact.
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You may be thinking that you have to go into each drum part and fix the length before continuing. However, you can apply a transform to any track simply by highlighting it in the arrange page before clicking on the ‘select and operate’ button.
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The 909 kit also provides that famous snare sound as heard on almost every Trance and Epic House tune known to mankind and here we’ve programmed a simple pattern on the second and fourth beat of every bar. We’ve also fixed the velocity of that to 110.
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Finally, for our main drum pattern, we’ve added a 909 clap at the same point as the snare hits to help give the part a little extra edge. This is an often used trick used to lift the snare hits from the kick drum playing beneath it.
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In this example we’ve merged all the drum tracks together so that we can see where all our respective drum parts fall and it’s easy from here to alter any velocities of individual instruments by using the velocity tool from the toolbox on the left of the page.
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Trance basslines can be incredibly simple, but the sound is very important. We’re using a Roland SC8850 which has an aptly titled RubberBass sounds at program change 39. The great thing about this sound is that the harder you hit it the more filter opens which can add some depth to the part.
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If you examine our bass line closely you can see that it basically plays octave parts that go from F to D# to C# and finally C Natural. At the very end of the fourth bar we then have a small octave run that ascends through these notes.
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Because our bass sound responds to velocity in terms of opening the filter we can experiment with different values at certain points within the bassline. Here we’ve opted to increase the velocity, and the filter value, at positions 4.3.1.1, 4.3.2.1 and 4.4.3.1.
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Now we need a suitable hook or a riff for our track and for this we’ve decided to use Native Instrument’s Pro 52 Prophet V emulation. The great thing about plug in instruments is that we can program in the MIDI Domain and subsequently apply any plug in effect.
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Here’s the main riff as programmed on our Pro 52 which we can immediately see is very simple. However we’ve also applied an ensemble plug in effect as an insert on our audio instrument channel to beef up the sound considerably.
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We’ve also added a tempo delay taking care to match this to the tempo of the track. Delays are widely used in Trance and Epic House to provide an added dimension to the track or part and tempo delays are probably the easiest way of achieving quick and effective results.
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Because plug in instruments and effects can put a considerable strain on your computer’s processor it makes sense to share the load as effectively as possible. Here we’ve copied the Pro52 part and assigned it to a fat sound on our SC8850 before transposing it up one octave.
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You may need to tweak a sound on your sound source to give a similar one to that used here. Using controllers 71 for resonance and 74 for filter cutoff you can open the filter up and add a touch of resonance to boost these higher frequencies. Experiment until you find something that works for you.
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Now we have the Pro52 and the SC8850 playing in unison which should fatten the part up very nicely. However, if you want to get truly epic you’ll have to do a little more work to broaden the sound. Here we’ve programmed in a harmony part playing the SC8850 sound.
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At last our part is beginning to sound large but we can still push things further. Try panning the Pro52 and the Roland in opposite directions. Or take the harmony part, set up the same sound on a separate MIDI channel and pan this and the normal part in opposite directions.
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Now we have our main theme we might want to add some extra elements to give the track even more space. Arpeggios can work wonders within any dance track by adding yet another hypnotic element to certain points within our track.
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Here’s a simple arpeggio pattern that took all of two minutes to come up with but when assigned to an appropriate sound can give just the right effect need to lift the track. In this instance we’ve programmed a sound using the Pro Five that seems to fit quite well.
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Just as we did with the Pro52, we’ve taken our Pro Five arpeggio and put it through the original tempo delay to give the part some added dimension. Delays can also help soften up a part nicely which is essentially what we’re looking for here.
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Using the previous arpeggio we can create another entirely unique version with the minimum of effort. All we have to do is copy the original part and go back into our transform window again only this time selecting ‘half speed’ from the top left window.
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By ‘selecting and operating’ this we have now created an entirely new arpeggio part and all we have to do is assign it to an appropriate sound. We’ve opted to open another Pro 52 and program a suitable sound before adding some of that tempo delay again.
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Using the half and double speed functions within the transform window can lead to some awesome results on an abundance of different instruments. Here is the net result of taking a very slow piano part and doubling the speed repeatedly until we’re left with a neat fill.
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Finally, here the entire four bar section as seen from main arrange window. By using any or all of this as the basis of your track it should be easy to create your own Try changing drum patterns or adding fills at strategic points or simply muting and de-muting objects over time.
