Progressive Trance

What it is

Progressive trance is a British invention and the name is honest: it came out of a scene that valued the gradual over the immediate, in the mid nineties around Sasha, John Digweed, Way Out West and the Hooj Choons and Perfecto catalogues. The tempo drops to about 132, the melody stops being a hook and becomes a texture, and the arrangement moves by adding or subtracting one element at a time across eight or nine minutes. In the 2000s Anjunadeep and a long list of Dutch producers took the same word somewhere lighter and closer to house. Both versions share the same principle, which is that nothing in the track should arrive on a bar line loudly enough that you can point at the moment it happened.

What it sounds like

Rolling. Closed hats run all sixteen sixteenths in a narrow band so the top end is a continuous surface rather than a set of events, with the open hat reserved for the last sixteenth of the bar. A tambourine takes the offbeat eighths. The kick is medium weight with a soft click, the clap is short and placed slightly to one side, and the bassline plays a two bar figure rather than one note. Above them a filtered arpeggio and a pad that changes very slowly indeed. Everything is wide, and reverb is used to place elements at different distances rather than to make the mix bigger.

Key elements

• Sixteenth hats in a narrow bandFifteen closed hits in bar one with a velocity spread under thirty points. They read as a surface rather than as a rhythm you could count along with.
• Open hat over the barlineOn the last sixteenth of the bar rather than on any offbeat, so it rings across the downbeat and the loop leans forward instead of resetting itself.
• Tambourine on the offbeatEvery and, at 58 to 66. It takes the job the open hat does in uplifting trance and does it at a small fraction of the volume.
• A two bar basslineNot one note per bar. A figure that resolves across two bars is what stops a nine minute track from being audibly a loop.
• A pickup kickOne extra kick on the last sixteenth of bar two at 80, quiet enough to be felt rather than counted, which is how the loop hands itself back to the top.

How to get them

• KickMedium length, soft click at 2kHz, weight at 48Hz. It should not be the loudest thing in the mix, which at this tempo it does not need to be anyway.
• HatsOne sample, all sixteen sixteenths, velocities cycling around 64, 36, 48, 36. Vary the pitch by a semitone on the quiet ones so the run does not machine-gun.
• ArpeggioSixteenth notes on a detuned saw through a ladder filter, cutoff automated by hand across sixteen bars, with a ping pong delay at a dotted eighth.
• Reverb as depthA 4 second hall on the pad, a 1.2 second room on the clap and the tambourine, nothing on the kick or the hats. Three distances rather than one wash.
• Automate rather than arrangeChange a filter, a send level or a pan position over eight bars instead of dropping a new part in. The genre is named after exactly this habit.
• Make it nine minutesThe form does not work at four. Write the long version first and cut a radio edit out of it afterwards if you turn out to need one.

Reference points

Sasha, John Digweed, Way Out West, Chicane, Solarstone, and the Hooj Choons, Perfecto and Anjunadeep catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.