One common question that budding producers ask is “How do I create a rolling bassline?” To help answer that question for myself, I spent some time anlayzing some current tracks from a few producers that make use of rolling basslines, like Super8 & Tab. Rolling bassline pattern consists of alternating 16th notes. The simplest way [...]

Welcome to the Trance Music Mastery blog. I’m Scott McLean and I’ve created this blog to help explain what I’ve learned along the way in producing electronic music, with a focus on Trance music, which happens to be my favorite genre of electronic music and is vast enough in it’s own right. I will be [...]

Recently, I’ve been listening to a new track released by Cosmic Gate called “Barra”. After several listens, there’s one element of the production that caught my attention as it only occurs 4 times in the entire 6 minute 54 second track. The element is a pluck sound sort of like this: [Audio clip: view full [...]

The Access Virus TI Polar supports a special filter mode on Filter 1 called “Analog 1 Pole”, “Analog 2 Pole”, “Analog 3 Pole” and “Analog 4 Pole”. Each of these filter modes simulate the low-pass filter found on the Minimoog(TM) synthesizer, which has a very desirable sound quality to it. Before reading this post, if [...]

Continuing our investigation of filters, this post will look at the Band Stop filter. For the purposes of this post I’ll be using noise samples taken from the Access Virus TI Polar. Just like the low pass, high pass, and band pass filters, a band stop filter has a parameter called “Cutoff” which corresponds to [...]