Hard Trance

What it is

The sound everyone thinks of first is a factory preset. The Roland Alpha Juno 2 shipped in 1986 with a patch called What The, a detuned pulse stack with the pulse width modulation turned up, and by 1992 it had been sampled onto so many records that it stopped being a preset and became an instrument. Belgian new beat got there first, and Dutch and German hard trance built a genre on it. The tempo runs 140 to 155, the kick is distorted, the offbeat open hat is enormous, and every sixteen bars the track stops dead for a snare roll. It is the direct ancestor of hardstyle, which has its own page in the hardcore family, and a first cousin to UK hard house, and it was mostly finished by 2003, before the Dutch scene brought the same sound back in a harder form.

What it sounds like

Loud and mid-heavy. A distorted kick with a lot of 200Hz in it, a clap compressed until it clicks, and an open hat on every offbeat that is genuinely as loud as the clap is. The closed hat plays only the e of each beat, so the top end has four quiet events a bar and nothing else, which leaves an enormous amount of room for the hoover. That sound is the lead: a detuned pulse stack with a slow filter sweep, played as long single notes rather than as a melody, usually pitched down an octave and put through a phaser.

Key elements

• The hooverThe Alpha Juno What The patch, or a stack of detuned pulse waves imitating it. Played as sustained single notes with a filter sweep across them, not as a tune.
• Closed hats on the e onlyOne quiet hit per beat, on the sixteenth immediately after the kick. It leaves the rest of the bar to the open hat and to the lead.
• Open hats at clap levelOn all four offbeats at 100 to 106, within four to ten points of the clap. It is the loudest hi-hat programming anywhere in this family.
• An eight step snare rollHalf a bar of sixteenth claps climbing from 56 to 110. In an arrangement it runs for a full bar or two and stops the track dead while it happens.
• A distorted kickSaturated hard enough to have real energy at 200Hz. It is doing the work a sub would do elsewhere, because these records were mixed for tents rather than for clubs.

How to get them

• KickA 909 kick into a tube distortion and then a band-pass around 150 to 250Hz. The weight should come from the distortion products rather than from a sine layer.
• HooverThree or four detuned pulse oscillators with the pulse width modulated by an LFO near 5Hz, into a resonant low-pass with a slow manual sweep, then a phaser and a short reverb.
• Open hatAs loud as your clap, decay about three quarters, in a choke group with the closed hat. If it feels too loud in the room it is probably correct.
• The rollEight sixteenth claps across beats 3 and 4 climbing from 56 to 110, with the open and closed hats pulled off those steps entirely. Program every hit by hand.
• Compress the clapFast attack, high ratio, enough gain reduction that the transient audibly clicks. This is one of very few places in dance music where an overcompressed clap is correct.
• Stop the trackCut everything except the roll for a bar, then bring the whole arrangement back on the downbeat. That drop is the form and it happens two or three times a record.

Reference points

Yves Deruyter, DJ Scot Project, Kai Tracid, Cosmic Gate's early records, and the Tidy Trax and Bonzai catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.