Originally posted on October 25, 2013

In this episode, I talked about and played a song called “Tremble” that I composed and recorded in October 2013. It is my first “Trance” dance song.

When listening to trance music, I heard a great song called Symphonica by Daniel Kandi. It had a number of elements that I really liked, and I used it as a loose reference track on this song.

I used Reason 5 and took advantage of the “Blocks” songwriting feature. Tremble uses an A block for the A section that repeats six times, a B block for the B section that repeats three times, and a C block for the C section that repeats three times. I then play the B block 2 times and the A block one time. Each time a block repeats, I can choose which instruments to play and which instruments to mute, allowing me to have a lot of variation on my repeated sections.

I used automation to change some settings while the song was playing. For example, I lower the EQ treble on six tracks in the B section heading to the soft mid-song breakdown. I was able to figure out how to move those six tracks onto a second mixer. That mixer’s output goes to one track on the main mixer. I can then change the EQ on just that one track.

In the C section, I tried to have a melody come in without a strong beat to try to fool people about where the beat is. When the drums come back in the C section, you might be surprised where the first downbeat is if you were thinking about it wrong. I explain this in the podcast.

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