Trance

Trance is patience with a kick drum. Thirty-two bars of it, then a breakdown, then thirty-two more.

— the Slopwright

Trance sits at about 136 to 140 BPM with a kick on every beat (four to the floor), an open hat on every offbeat and a clap on two and four. Everything is counted in 8-bar phrases, and the phrases add up to 32-bar sections: something new arrives, or leaves, on the first bar of each.

The shape is intro, main part, breakdown, build, drop, outro. The breakdown takes the kick away and leaves pads and the tune; the build brings tension back with a snare roll that gets faster and a rising noise, and stops for one beat; the drop is everything at once.

Two sounds do most of the work. The rolling bass plays between the kicks, and the sidechain pump turns the bass and pads down a little every time the kick hits, so the whole track breathes on the beat. The supersaw is seven slightly out-of-tune saw waves at once: one note, very wide. Minor keys and the chords i, VI, III and VII (Am, F, C, G) carry a lot of it; suspended chords keep a breakdown hanging.

The styles pull those parts in different directions. Uplifting makes the breakdown long and the tune big (Second Coat). Progressive runs slower, about 128 to 134, stays on two chords and lets a filter open over thirty-two bars instead (Slow Drying). Psy keeps the bass on the three sixteenths after every kick and puts an acid line on top, a saw through a filter turned slowly by hand, or here by the clock (Bench Grinder).

Try this

1. Play Four to the Floor and count the open hats: one between every two kicks.
2. Load the Trance pattern on the drum machine and take the kick out of steps 5 and 13. Hear how quickly it stops being trance.
3. Play The Pump and listen for the moment the kick comes in: the bass starts to breathe.
4. In Every Light On, find the breakdown (it starts at 1:51, bar 65) and the one empty beat before the drop (at 3:14).
5. Play Slow Drying from the start and listen only to the arpeggio: the notes hardly change for a minute, and it still gets brighter every bar.