Authoring a trance sound

Trance is not a preset category but a style: the wide, bright, endlessly sustaining supersaw that carries an anthem. One thing carries it more than anything else, and it is not a single fat oscillator. It is several oscillators stacked together, each running its own detune and each drifting at its own speed, so the layers breathe against one another and the wall of sound never sits still.

This page is a complete build. Choose New, in the Menu button in the top left corner, to clear the patch back to a single unshaped oscillator, then work down the sections in order: the raw tone, then its shape, then movement, then the effects that finish it. You do not need to have built anything else first.

You could reach a supersaw with one oscillator and stop there, and for a quick lead that is the fast route. This page builds it the other way, because a single oscillator is one detune spread, while two are two spreads you can place at different octaves, pan apart, and drift at different rates.

Two instrument guides go further where this page stops. Lead covers the expression a single line needs, and its supersaw variant is this oscillator section treated as an instrument rather than as a style. Pad covers chords that are held rather than played. Their tables are not this one's: a lead keeps its detune under 25 ct so the melody stays in tune, and this page starts at 42 ct on purpose. Follow the page whose sound you are actually building.

Each control below gets a start value and a range to try, and each entry says what happens when you cross an edge. The ranges come from what the style is, not from a survey of our presets. See how to read these tables for what the provenance tags mean.

Voice

• Voice Mode (production convention). An anthem is chords, so Poly. Mono with a short Glide gives the rolling single-note line the same tracks use before the chords arrive.

Oscillator

Set Osc 1 first, then give Osc 2 the same treatment. The three Osc 2 rows below say where the second stack should sit relative to the first, and the Drift Rate is the one that carries the page: the two stacks have to wander at different speeds or they lock together into a single thicker oscillator.

• Osc1 Mode (production convention). Each oscillator is its own detuned saw stack, and SuperSaw builds one directly: it generates the copies itself and never reads a wavetable, so the wavetable panel and Warp are unavailable in this mode.
• Osc1 Unison (production convention). A dense stack. The wall is made of copies.
• Osc1 Detune (production convention). Roughly double what a normal lead can take, and the one style where that is correct. Past about 35 ct the beating between the copies stops being a defect and becomes the timbre itself.
• Osc1 Drift (acoustic fact). Each copy wanders slightly, the way no ensemble of real players holds a perfectly fixed pitch. Past about 12 ct the wander reads as tuning instability rather than as life.
• Osc1 Drift Rate (acoustic fact). How fast the wander moves. Stacks drifting at different speeds never phase-lock, so instead of one frozen chorus you hear layers breathing independently inside the same note. A single detuned oscillator cannot do that. The Osc 2 Drift Rate row below is the other half, and the two must not match.
• Osc1 Width (production convention). A supersaw is a stereo object. It carries no low end of its own, since that is the bass part's job, so nothing collapses when a club system sums the low end to mono.
• Osc2 Level (production convention). The second stack is half the wall, not a garnish on top of the first. Below about 50% it stops being a layer you can hear and merely thickens Osc 1.
• Osc2 Detune (production convention). Deliberately a different spread from Osc 1. Two stacks with different spreads beat against each other at different rates, which is the thing one wider stack cannot do.
• Osc2 Drift Rate (production convention). The row this whole page turns on, and the one most often left at its default by accident. Osc 1 has its own drift rate above; give this one a different value and the two stacks wander out of step, so the supersaw never settles into a fixed shape however long the chord is held. Match the two rates and the stacks drift together, which is audibly one thick oscillator rather than two, and the width the page spent nine rows building quietly collapses.
• Warmth (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Kiwisynth-only, and high here: it glues the copies into one sound rather than several, ahead of the filter.

Osc 3 is silent by default. Raise it for a third layer, or leave it at 0 and bring it in with Mod Env 2, so the top layer arrives a moment after the chord rather than with it.

Filter

• Filter Type (production convention). A steep low-pass. The stack is already dense with harmonics, and a 24 dB slope is what holds the top of it down while the cutoff sweeps.
• Filter Cutoff, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (production convention). Lower than you would expect for a bright sound. The supersaw stack is already dense with harmonics, so opening the filter further adds harshness rather than brightness. The brightness in trance comes from movement, not from a high cutoff.
• Filter Reso, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (production convention). High, for the singing peak that gives a supersaw its character. A chord can carry it because the cutoff is sweeping under the mod wheel for most of a track, so the peak keeps moving and never settles on one partial long enough to whistle. Park the sweep and the same setting starts to.

Amp envelope

• Attack (production convention). The chord speaks the moment the key goes down. The long swell the genre is built on belongs to the filter, not to the amp: an amp attack slow enough to swell would swallow the front of every chord change.
• Decay (production convention). With the sustain high, the decay only shapes the settle after the attack.
• Sustain (production convention). A supersaw that fades while you are still holding it loses the wall, and the wall is the point.
• Release (production convention). Each chord rings on into the reverb so one change flows into the next.

Movement

The oscillators already breathe through their drift. The rest of the motion is the long, slow opening the genre is built on: the filter opens over many bars, partly on its own and partly under your hand.

• Note Bloom Rate (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Kiwisynth-only, and a natural fit for an anthem chord because it rewards holding: the tone keeps filling out for as long as the chord is down.
• Note Bloom to Filter Cutoff (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). The held chord opens as it is held, instead of standing still.
• Mod Wheel to Filter Cutoff (production convention). The filter opened by hand as the track builds. That gesture is what the genre is made of, and the mod wheel is where every keyboard player expects to find it.
• LFO3 Rate (production convention). About seven seconds per cycle for the pan swing below. Slow enough that the movement is felt as the width breathing rather than heard as the sound crossing the stereo field, which at anything much above 0.4 Hz turns into an auto-panner and pulls attention away from the chord.
• LFO 3 to Osc1 Pan (production convention). Half of a pair. On its own this routing pushes the whole sound to one side and back, which is a wobble rather than width. It is the row below, at the opposite sign, that turns it into two stacks swinging against each other.
• LFO 3 to Osc2 Pan (production convention). The same LFO at the same depth and the opposite sign, which is what makes the pair work. When Osc 1 swings left, Osc 2 swings right, so the stereo image rocks around a stable centre instead of the whole sound drifting bodily to one side. Match the magnitude to the row above: an uneven pair leaves a residual push in one direction that shows up as the mix wandering off centre over a long chord.

Put a macro on the detune of both oscillators. That gives you one knob that opens and closes the whole wall, which is the control you want your hand on while a track builds.

Effects

• Reverb Size (production convention). A large hall. It lets the release tails wash together, which is most of what makes an anthem sound like an anthem.
• Reverb Mix (production convention). More than a lead takes, because the chord is meant to sound like it is in a hall. Past about 45% the wall loses its front edge, and with it the drive.
• Delay Div (production convention). A dotted division, with Delay Sync on. The echoes land off the grid and fill the gaps between the notes rather than doubling them, which is where the sense of perpetual motion comes from.
• Delay FB (production convention). Enough repeats to carry the echoes across a bar. Past about 60% they outlast the chord and blur the next change.
• Delay Mix (production convention). The echoes are part of the pattern, not a second copy of it competing with the notes that made them.