Adding the Funk: Creating That Trance Groove...

A Correct. Trance basslines, that's Trance in the broad sense, including Robert Miles and Paul Oakenfold, going through to Psy Trance and Acid Techno, uses what's called a pedal bass in musical terms. This means that the bassline is either a single sustained note or a riff rooted around one note i.e it can have and often does have other notes, but these remain secondary in function. For example: to create accents.

This type of bassline is fundamental to Trance music and characterises it to such a large degree that it ceases to be Trance music as soon as you start to move the bass around to create different (temporary) key centres. I say that it ceases to be Trance because it doesn't function as Trance music in that it stops trancing you out.

Moving the bass around to create different key centres is what happens in normal diatonic music i.e. Pop, Blues, Country, Metal, most Jazz and Classical etc.

Which can be described as music based around:

1) A changing harmonic structure i.e. a chord progression - a movement which sets up temporary changes in key centres, but that always moves back to the tonic chord

2) A number of melodies, usually one but sometimes two. In this case the second melody would be called a counterpoint

3 )A bass line one of whose primary functions - if not the primary function - is to underpin and emphasise the harmonic movement.

Trance music is a different concept to this and more related to Classical Indian music in this respect. Classical Indian music uses an instrument called a Tampura to create a constant bass drone over which soloist plays variations on an original melody. Other examples of this concept are bagpipes which have a static drone pipe over which the tune is played. Another is Modal Jazz. A form of Jazz arguably invented by Miles Davis. This is a form contrary to almost all other jazz forms in that the bass stays static and the soloist changes mode or scales against this static foundation, to create different moods and imply different harmonic structures and movements.

Miles Davies - Musical innovator

Another example is the fairly large number of modern classical composers (i.e 20th Century) which have been exploring this same area.

How I see Trance music is that it is far more rooted in this concept i.e bass riff keeps generally quite static with perhaps occasional shifts for dramatic effect, and the melodies, scales, sounds, textures, noises, the frequencies change.

In fact it is unique in that in addition to the above it adds the technique of squeezing additional melodies and musical parts from inside the harmonic series of the notes already being used to play musical parts by use of resonant filters and filter cutoffs.

Keeping the bass rooted to one key centre has the effect of focussing the listener's attention on the textural and rhythmic aspects of the music. When one is relieved of subconciously focussing upon the movement of harmony - changing chords - which tends to demand your attention because musically a shift in bass is always dramatic shift, one starts to concentrate on and explore the finer details of the sound - i.e. what is changing against a background of what is not.

A Tampura

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