Uplifting Trance

What it is

By 1999 the arrangement had hardened into a form you could set a watch by. Two minutes of drums and a bassline, a breakdown of thirty two or sixty four bars in which the drums vanish and a melody arrives, a build, and then everything at once for two minutes. Uplifting trance, sometimes called euphoric, is the strand that treated that shape as the whole point and made the melodies bigger and bigger to justify it. Ferry Corsten, Armin van Buuren, Above and Beyond and the Dutch and German labels around them are the reference. It is easy to make badly, because a large melody over a plain kick is not difficult to assemble, and the good records are the ones where the two minutes before the breakdown are worth hearing on their own.

What it sounds like

A hard clean kick with real sub under it, a clap with two seconds of plate behind it, and open hats on every offbeat mixed loud. Closed hats fill the beat and the a and leave the offbeat to the open hat alone. The bass is a plucked offbeat eighth, ducked hard by the kick. Above that: supersaw chords playing four bars of a progression and a lead line an octave up doubled by a second synth. Everything harmonic is drenched in a long hall and sidechained to the kick, so the whole upper half of the mix breathes in time with the drums.

Key elements

• The offbeat bassA plucked note on every and, ducked by the kick with a fast release. It is the engine of the genre and it is the first thing to get right.
• Open hats on every offbeatAll four, at 96 to 102, doubling the offbeat bass. Only hard trance further down this list pushes them louder than that.
• A crash on the phraseOne crash on the downbeat, marking a sixteen bar boundary in a full arrangement. It is the only cymbal in the track that is not a hi-hat.
• The sixty four bar breakdownDrums out, melody in, nothing else. The genre is organised around this and everything before it exists so that it lands when it arrives.
• Sidechain everything harmonicPads, leads and reverb returns all ducked by the kick with about a 180 millisecond release, so the top of the mix pulses even when the drums are simple.

How to get them

• KickA clicky top layer and a sine tail tuned to the root, total length around 350ms. High-pass everything else in the mix at 100Hz so it has the bottom to itself.
• BassA plucked saw on the offbeat eighths, decay about 180ms, low-passed at 400Hz, with a compressor keyed from the kick at 8 to 1 and a 180ms release.
• ClapA 909 clap layered with a short noise burst into a 2 second plate high-passed at 400Hz. Duck the plate return with the kick or the tail fills the entire bar.
• The leadTwo synths an octave apart on the same line, one saw and one square, with a dotted eighth delay on the upper one only. Automate a low-pass across the eight bars before the drop.
• BuildEight bars of rising noise, a snare ramp in the last bar, and two beats of complete silence before the kick returns. The silence does more work than the noise does.
• Write the melody firstEverything else is scaffolding for it. If the melody does not work played on a piano with no effects at all, no amount of supersaw is going to rescue it.

Reference points

Ferry Corsten, Armin van Buuren, Above and Beyond, Rank 1, Gouryella, and the Armada, Black Hole and Anjunabeats catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.