Dream Trance

What it is

In 1995 a club DJ in Fano recorded a piano figure over a trance kick and called it Children. Robert Miles had made it to play at the end of the night, on the theory that people who had spent six hours dancing to something very fast should be sent home to something slower, and the Italian scene around Milan and Rimini turned that into a genre inside a year. Dream trance is the softest thing in this family and the only branch of it built around an acoustic instrument. The tempo sits near 137, the drums are mixed down rather than up, and the piano carries the melody a monosynth would carry anywhere else on this list. It burned out fast, partly because every label in Italy released one, and its effect on the euphoric strand that followed is larger than its reputation suggests.

What it sounds like

A grand piano sample with a long tail, doubled an octave up by a string patch, over drums that never rise above it. The kick is round and short. The clap is soft and slightly reverberant. Open hats on the offbeat are present but at conversational level, and the only sixteenth motion in the record comes from a quiet hat on the last sixteenth of each beat. Underneath, a warm sustained bass in eighths. Tom fills played on a sampled roto tom mark the ends of eight bar phrases. The impression is of trance with everything except the melody pulled back four decibels.

Key elements

• The pianoA sampled grand, played as a two hand figure rather than as stabs, with the sustain pedal held down. It is the melody, the harmony and half of the rhythm section.
• Drums mixed under the melodyThe kick peaks at 108 and the clap at 90, which is ten to fifteen points below where the rest of this family puts them. That headroom is what the piano fills.
• Hats only on the aOne quiet closed hat on the last sixteenth of each beat and nothing else between the offbeats. It suggests sixteenth motion without actually supplying any.
• Tom fillsA descending figure across the last beat of every second bar, played on toms rather than on snares. It comes straight off the Italo records these producers grew up with.
• A bass that holdsSustained eighths rather than plucked offbeats, so the low end supports the piano chords instead of arguing with them for the same beat.

How to get them

• PianoA real sampled grand, not an electric piano. Play the part in with the sustain pedal down, quantise at about 40 percent strength, and leave the velocity variation alone.
• KickShort and round, weight at 50Hz with the click rolled off above 3kHz. Sidechain the piano to it by no more than two decibels, because a visible pump ruins the illusion that someone is playing.
• ClapA 909 clap into a plate of about 1.4 seconds, high-passed at 400Hz, mixed so the tail is longer than the hit itself. Keep the dry level low.
• StringsDouble the top line of the piano an octave up with a string pad, filtered at around 6kHz, and delay it by ten milliseconds so it reads as a halo rather than as a second instrument.
• TomsSample one roto tom, pitch it down in three steps for the fill, and put a short room on the whole group. Four hits at the end of every second bar is plenty.
• Keep the breakdown longTake everything out except the piano for sixty four bars. The genre exists because somebody wanted the quiet part to be the record rather than the pause in it.

Reference points

Robert Miles, DJ Dado, Zhi-Vago, Nalin and Kane, Gala, and the Italian DBX and Time catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.