Task 1C: Trance Patience Arrangement (P2)

This is part two of the Trance Patience Task 1C arrangement, Part 1 – setting up your project and initial ideas can be found here –  Task 1C arrangement Trance with Patience

In this tutorial, we are going to be looking at developing our arrangements and adding more elements from Take That’s – “Patience” song.

Reversed Cymbal

A technique that I hear quite a lot in Trance music is the use of a reversed cymbal to help transition between different sections. For this I have ‘bounced in place’ a percussion instrument track, originally EXS24 (sampler). This is so that I could use the fade tool.

Cool Trick:

Look at the above reversed cymbal, notice that the third cymbal has an orange fade, This is actually a slow down. To do, this first create a fade using the fade tool, then press ‘ctrl + Click’ and change the setting from fade to slow down.

Auto Panning:

During my 2/4 slow down section, I have added some extra percussion (idea taken from ‘Martin Garrix – Animals’ song). The production technique that I have used is an auto-panning filter, to make the notes bounce from the left speaker to the right.

Patience Vocal

I have deliberately left three sections before my vocal track enters. This is so the melodic theme has more of an impact. I have also halved the speed of the melody to give the feel that the whole track has slowed down

The best way of entering in the vocal performance is by playing in the notes from a MIDI keyboard (being able to play basic keyboard is an essential skill for all sound engineers and producers). By playing in the notes, you can get more realistic vocal phrasings, for my performance I have then quantised the notes afterwards to maintain the rigid feel of the trance track.

Portamento / Glide

The synth for my vocal track is the ES2 which has a really good glide parameter. The glide or portamento setting is a monophonic synth technique to get the notes to glide smoothly from one note to the next. For this setting to have any effect the notes must be overlapping. As well as the glide you should also use the pitch bend wheel to recreate some of the vocal slurs from the Patience song.

My ES2 Settings for the vocal track:

Final note for the vocal. Repetition is a common feature of a trance melody, work out which parts of the vocal you want to use and then find good phrases that you can repeat. Using the slow down effect discussed earlier would also work well on this track, especially for the repetitive sections.

Backing Vocals

Next from Patience I have used short extracts of their backing vocal phases. I have deliberately only used a few of these as I felt to use them all would have gone against the simple feel of the trance track.

Each vocal part has been put on its own instrument track and assigned an individual timbre, I have then passed these tracks to a buss with a ring modulator assigned to it, this  has given me the full bodied and modulated texture that I wanted.