Tech Trance

What it is

What happens when a trance producer stops writing melodies and starts writing riffs. Tech trance sits at 138 to 142 with a harder and shorter kick than the euphoric strand, a bass closer to a techno bassline than to a plucked offbeat, and a lead that is usually one bar of a filtered noise or a distorted stab repeated rather than a tune. Marco V, Sander van Doorn's early records, John Askew, Simon Patterson and the Vandit and Discover catalogues are where it lives. It solved a specific problem for DJs: a trance set that never leaves the euphoric register gets tiring, and this is what you play between the big records. Its relationship to peak time techno is close and the two share plenty of rooms, but the offbeat open hats and the sixteen bar breakdown are still trance.

What it sounds like

Harder and drier than uplifting trance and a good deal less bright than psytrance. The kick is short with a heavy click and the clap is dry and centred. The hats are frankly borrowed from techno, a sixteenth roll under loud offbeat open hats, but they are gated rather than continuous: the roll runs for two beats and then stops dead, and a shaker holds the sixteenths while it is away. The lead is one bar long, a stab or a filtered noise sweep or a gated chord, run through distortion and a phaser, and it repeats without variation for thirty two bars at a stretch.

Key elements

• A one bar riffNot a melody. A stab or a gated chord that repeats for thirty two bars while a filter moves across it, which is a techno idea rather than a trance one.
• Borrowed hats, switched on and offThe beat plus e plus a roll under offbeat open hats is techno's, and an acid techno record at this tempo starts from the same steps. What is different is that the roll rests for half of every bar.
• The offbeat that is not openThe and of 3 gets a closed tick instead of an open hat, in both bars. One offbeat behaving differently from the other three is what stops the pattern reading as four identical beats.
• A shaker in the gapsIt takes the e and the a of whichever two beats the closed hat has abandoned, so the sixteenth density never changes even though the sound of it does.
• Short open hatsDecay cut to about 200 milliseconds so they stop before the next sixteenth rather than ringing into it. Lush open hats belong to the euphoric strand.
• Kicks that rollA doubled kick on the a of 2 in bar two and a pickup on the final sixteenth. Both come from techno and both are what give the loop its shove into the next bar.

How to get them

• KickShort, around 250ms, with a click at 3kHz that is audible on its own. Distort it lightly with a tape saturator and high-pass it at 40Hz so the doubled hits stay separate.
• BassSixteenths rather than offbeat eighths, on a short plucked saw with a fast filter envelope. Sidechain by four decibels rather than the ten uplifting trance uses.
• Gate the hatsWrite the sixteenth roll across all four beats, then delete it from two of them and let the shaker take those. Muting half a hat pattern is quicker than programming a clever one and it sounds less designed.
• Open hatsCut the decay to about 200ms with a volume envelope and put them in a choke group with the closed hats. Leave the and of 3 to a closed tick rather than opening all four.
• The riffOne bar. Run it through a distortion, then a phaser at a very slow rate, then automate a band-pass across thirty two bars. Do not write a second bar for it.
• ShakerQuiet, between 34 and 46, high-passed at 4kHz and panned a little wider than the hats, so the handover between the two is audible as a move across the stereo field.
• Keep the breakdown shortSixteen bars, not sixty four. The whole reason this exists is to be the record in the set that does not stop for a minute and a half.

Reference points

Marco V, Sander van Doorn, John Askew, Simon Patterson, Bryan Kearney, and the Vandit, Discover and Kearnage catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.