Trance Tips for Beginners

I thought I would open this up to any experienced producer to help those starting out. Ok here are mine:

When you have found some decent kick samples, load your favourite into a sampler and use your pads or keys to make the 4 on the floor and fill rhythms - it makes a subtle but important difference to the feel and energy of the kick I have recently discovered this! You should quantise your efforts obviously.

Before you begin a song select some really phat basses, pluck and saw leads and pad sounds -make sure they work well together, as well as individually - Think of this as your sound palette, the better the sounds you use, the easier it will be to learn the art of compression, EQ and mixing. Just like an artist learns to mix colours better, when she uses the same colours over and over, so it is a good place to begin in sound production imho.

Study Harmony - Bach can teach you loads!

[Europica]

Hi Stephen

great topic and some very good advice there. I'd also like to add if I may that whatever synths you do use they have to, I mean have to sound "the business". I used to use free ones, namely, Superwave Pro, Superwave Trance Pro and Superwave Performer. I think only the latter is available now and they did the job for me.

I picked up Z3ta+ for around £50 from Digital Village some years ago and its by far the best Synth I have, and its totally programable. So it's not a lot of money for what you get.

Other softsynths that I think will help are Sylinth, Rapture, and Nexus 1 or 2, but Nexus is pretty expensive as is Omnisphere which aslo need a lot of HD space.

If anyone can recommed any other "free" synths that are out there that I just dont know about plz post.

ahh, just remembered. For a beginner I'd also recommed a book entitled "The Dance Music Manual, by Rick Snoman. It coveres a number of different genres including Trance and goes into detail about mixing using compression, eq-ing, etc etc.

Once again a great topic to discuss.


EDIT: Opps thats Superwave Performers was free.

[LUMINUS1]

Originally Posted by Europica

Hi Stephen

great topic and some very good advice there. I'd also like to add if I may that whatever synths you do use they have to, I mean have to sound "the business". I used to use free ones, namely, Superwave Pro, Superwave Trance Pro and Superwave Performer. I think only the latter is available now and they did the job for me.

I picked up Z3ta+ for around £50 from Digital Village some years ago and its by far the best Synth I have, and its totally programable. So it's not a lot of money for what you get.

Other softsynths that I think will help are Sylinth, Rapture, and Nexus 1 or 2, but Nexus is pretty expensive as is Omnisphere which aslo need a lot of HD space.




If anyone can recommed any other "free" synths that are out there that I just dont know about plz post.

ahh, just remembered. For a beginner I'd also recommed a book entitled "The Dance Music Manual, by Rick Snoman. It coveres a number of different genres including Trance and goes into detail about mixing using compression, eq-ing, etc etc.

Once again a great topic to discuss.


EDIT: Opps thats Superwave Performers was free.

some nice vsts you use.. zeta old now but it still holds it own.. nexus is just a rompler pity it never was a real vst

[Matt]

majority of my sounds come from Sylenth1

and my lead main sounds i design from scratch

its why no preset can match my sounds~

[Steven Silverthorn]

As for free synths - dunno if 'Synth1' is still available?. If anyone would like a copy of this and GenesisCM, PM me. Both are really great synths. Since I switched to Mac both are useless to me now.

As for synths with a price - as well as Sylenth, the Zebra2 synth is also a great one to programme. Recently I tried Gladiator and was impressed, but in the end I chose Omnisphere, as it has awesome presets, but also, is pretty nifty when it comes to making your own sounds. As you say it is CPU and HD greedy, but worth it I think.

Obviously check out the specialised section in the forum ------

'Must have' free VST's?