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A history of trance music

Trance music is a form of dance music characterised by an emphasis on synthesized melodies and house style electronic 4/4 beats. Trance tracks are usually based around heavily quantized melodies, with a hypnotic and often repetitive feel (hence the name). Common sounds heard in trance are arpeggiated and gated synth riffs and sweeping pads, with the few real instruments limited usually to piano, strings and acoustic guitar, if used at all. Often large, amounts of delay and reverb are used, adding to the emotional, uplifting quality of the genre.

Early Days

The first forms of trance music emerged in the early 1990s as the dance revolution gripped the UK and mainland Europe. House music had already taken hold, and techno had also become popular in Europe by this time. Most of the dance music being produced at the start of the decade was sampler-based; sampling technology was relatively new at the time, and had become affordable enough for it to be mainstream. By the middle of the decade, however, dance pioneers were looking to take their sounds in a new direction; this led to the reappearance of the synthesizer which, despite being heavily used in the early 1980s new romantic and electro boom, had been rather overlooked since the sample-based dance music revolution of the mid to late 1980s.

Two particularly influential synthesizers did continue to play a part in early house music - Roland's TB-303 Basslineand TR-909 drum machine. Misuse of the TB-303 formed the basis of acid house, originating in America and becoming popular in the UK between 1987 and 1990, while the TR-909 formed the basis of the vast majority of house music rhythms by the 1990s. While house eventually moved away from TR-909 based rhythms by incorporating sampled drum loops and breakbeats, trance music retained the TR-909 sounds which continued to be popular right through until the 2000s. Acid house featured many of the characteristics of trance, but was was a more minimal genre with a focus on the sound of a repeating, distorted TB-303 riff rather than the melody created by the TB-303 itself. This may have been partly due to the TB-303 only featuring a single octave keybord (although options to increase or decrease the octave range were available), which had to be programmed rather than played. By 1990,acid house had been superseded by more melodic forms of house and techno, with piano house becoming popular and stab-driven techno melodies starting to feature in early rave music.

Against this backdrop, some early tracks were released which proved influential in the future development of trance. Future Sound of London released Papua New Guinea in 1991 - essentially a breakbeat techno track but featuring uplifting atmospheric pad sounds rather than the rave stabs or piano riff samples common at the time. Hardfloor, a German techno group, released Hardtrance Acperience in 1992 - a piercing acid house cut but with a greater focus on melody than traditional acid house. This sound was taken even further on their 1994 tracks Into The Nature and Fish and Chips. Jam and Spoon, also from Germany, released Stella in 1992 and remixed Age Of Love the same year, which are widely regarded as the first trance tracks. In 1993, a track called Dreams was released by Quench, becoming an underground club hit which also received airplay on Pete Tong's UK Radio 1 show during December 1993. This was a very early example of a trance track combining atmospheric pads, and the filtered saw-wave synthesizer riffs more commonplace by the end of the decade - indeed, Lost Tribe's Gamemaster from 1998 features a riff based on Dreams. One giveaway that Dreams is an earlier production is that the cutoff filter sweep occurs quickly across the synth riff rather than gradually building up, as on later trance tracks. More typical of the proto-trance sound around at that time is the vocal mix of Celebrate by Miro; the filter sweeps are not yet present, but Celebrate does feature an infectious, repeated lead riff over gradually building synth pads and a bassline which changes key, techniques employed by trance producers in later years to create the trademark hypnotic feel of the genre.

While piano house, jungle and garage dominated British clubs in the mid-1990s, trance music continued to develop in continental Europe, particularly in Germany. Early trance featured many elements from European techno and commercial European rave music from the era, such as the Mark'Oh trackTears Don't Lie (1995), began to take on the stuttering, gated synthesizer chords later associated with trance. Gradually, this sound diverged as a genre in its own right, and underground trance steered away from the toytown-style major key riffs while retaining its melody-driven feel. Italian producer Robert Miles released Children in 1995, featuring classical style piano and strings alongside the gated trance pads and helping to start a subgenre known as "dream house". In the UK, meanwhile, some house and techno producers began to pick up on the trance sound and incorporated it into their tracks, for example JX with You Belong To Me (1995) - the No Respect remix being a good example of an early UK trance sound. This style became known as Nu-NRG and became faster and harder, taking on elements such as Roland Alpha Juno 2 "hoover" synthesizer noises and off-beat bass stabs, eventually morphing into UK hard house.

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