Happy New Year everyone and what better way to start with an epic all-new ‘How To Make’ course as we deep dive into the world of Classic Trance!
Believe it or not, this is the first ‘How To Make’ course from our good friend Bluffmunkey, and following on from his momentous ‘Trance Essentials’ course he decided to build a trance track live from scratch while keeping to the methods used ‘back in the day’ from the late 90s and early 2000s.
Going back to where it all started for Bluffmunkey, he opens Cubase to revisit the process of building the initial drums and chord progression that’ll start this 7-hour journey into producing an absolute Classic Trance track.
Packed full of tips, tricks, sound design and old skool wisdom - all while keeping the plugin and track count to a minimum, this is a course all Trance headz out there need to watch!
Brilliant course - I would have killed for this kind of step by step guidance “back in the day”. I remember trying to create music like this with a mate, probably around 1999. We were using a Yamaha CS1x, Roland MC505, Akai S1000, Novation BassStation and an Atari ST running Cubase. All through a cheap 8 tack mixing desk and then recorded and overdubbed onto Minidisc. We didn’t know what a compressor was, had no idea of what we were doing, and it all sounded predictably dreadful…
Absolutely love it, really like the track although i just recently got into trance listening to the more uplifting darren porter type stuff… but i think i will give it a go and try to recreate an “oldschool” trance track, i am hooked.
One thing in genereal, it would be cool if you guys could include the synth-presets in to the Resources cause for me i use fl studio and cannot open the project… Nuff said, thanks for this and all the other great courses. Love SA! Cheers
A great addition the Sonic Academy line up - with an amazing teacher too, love all the vids made with Mr Bluffmunkey; he always gives away too much usuable information, tips, insights and history… although I did laugh when I saw that he used Cubase for this track… Because I just bought Ableton, and much of that was because I realised how good and simple it was to work with from watching Bluffmunkey!
Anyway, a lot fell into place for me watching this, I’d like to think that much is to do with my own musical journey, but obviously it is an excellent course and urge anyone with a passing interest to the way it was done back in the day to check this one out.
“You are becoming aware of yourself as a gamemaster.”
Haha don’t worry, Ableton Live will still feature in the vast majority of future videos. This time, Cubase was just a throwback experiment for me. There’s nothing I did in Cubase here that can’t be done in Live, with the exception of a slightly different method of grouping tracks in Live, but the end results would still be the same.
Absolutely! I’ve followed your technique and have only used the T-Racks British Channel on each part, so far it’s sounding really good, and has been a breathe of fresh air to the usual option paralysis that I can suffer from.
Epic and very helpful. Managed to create a very big helping of cheese by starting my chord progression in D Major … persevering but I realise why I’ve never tried to do anything in that key before!
Absolutely awesome tutorial! I’ve started trying to accomplish more with less by picking the right sounds and keep the track count low because I’m currently stuck using a laptop I initially bought to be a biggianttablet and not for production at all. It’s forcing me to think carefully about what I’m doing an why I’m doing it.
This is my favourite tutorial so far and I have been a member on and off for >5 years. Great down to earth tutorial and I love the focus on the history and evolution of the genre.
It’s inspired me to write Trance mainly using my hardware incl Midi sequencing.
Trance just isn’t as good as it used to be compared to the classic days. Intro, break, build, drop, outro. ‘Modern’ trance sounds all too similar now, its a shame its gone that way. Bring back the 8-11 minute tracks of a journey that classic trance takes you on!
