Goa Trance

What it is

Goa is a state on the west coast of India, and from the late seventies onward it had a party scene that ran on whatever the travelling DJs could carry. By 1993 that meant DAT tapes of European trance with the vocals edited out, and shortly after that it meant records made specifically for those parties. Goa trance is what came back the other way: Hallucinogen, Astral Projection, Man With No Name, Total Eclipse, and the Dragonfly and TIP labels in London. The music is built for a sound system outdoors at four in the morning, which is why the mixes are so bright and why the bass is a short plucked note rather than a sustained one. Melodies are modal, usually Phrygian dominant, played on stacked monosynth layers, and a track is a single climb from beginning to end with no drop in it anywhere.

What it sounds like

Very bright and very busy above 2kHz. Sixteenth hi-hats run almost continuously, an acoustic snare appears in ones and twos rather than on a backbeat, and hand percussion borrowed from tabla and darbuka records fills whatever the hats leave. The lead is three or four detuned monosynth layers playing the same modal line, with a phaser and a long delay across all of them at once. There is a lot of reverb and it is used as distance rather than as a wash. Sound effects, samples of films and gongs and rushing water, are structural rather than decorative.

Key elements

• Hats that skip the downbeatEleven of the sixteen sixteenths, leaving the four beats to the kick, in a narrow velocity band. The hats are the texture rather than the accent and they are meant to blur.
• A snare that is not a backbeatOne acoustic snare on the a of 2 and a three hit ramp at the end of the phrase. Beats 2 and 4 stay empty, which is why the loop never quite resolves.
• Two tabla pitchesA high drum and a low one on a figure that resolves over two bars rather than one, placed in the gaps between the hats rather than on top of them.
• Phrygian dominant leadsThe scale with a flat second and a major third. It is where the Eastern colour actually comes from, far more than any sample choice does.
• Layered monosynthsThree or four voices playing the same line at slightly different filter settings and detunings, bounced together and treated afterwards as one instrument.

How to get them

• HatsOne closed hat sample, velocities alternating around 44 and 58, and nothing at all on the beats themselves. A light saturator and a high shelf on the hat bus so the loud ones open and the quiet ones do not.
• Lead stackThree monosynths on the same MIDI part, detuned by 6, 0 and minus 7 cents, each with a different cutoff, then a phaser and a dotted eighth delay across the group bus.
• BassA short plucked sawtooth on the second, third and fourth sixteenth of every beat, with the first left to the kick. Decay under 90ms so each note stops before the next kick lands.
• PercussionTwo tabla samples at different pitches, panned about 30 percent apart, on a two bar phrase. Send them to a plate longer than anything else in the mix.
• Reverb as distanceA 4 second hall on the leads, a 1 second room on the percussion, nothing at all on the kick. Three distinct depths in one mix is the Goa trick.
• Build, do not loopWrite eight minutes that add one layer every sixteen bars and never remove one until the last minute. There is no drop in this music, only accumulation.

Reference points

Hallucinogen, Astral Projection, Man With No Name, Total Eclipse, Etnica, and the Dragonfly, TIP and Blue Room Released catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.