Express to Nowhere
A trance train that leaves the station at 32 BPM and pumps up to 140, carried by underwater filter cuts and hard sidechain on an almost boring loop.
- Key
- A minor
- Tempo
- 32 to 140 BPM
- Length
- 3:24
- Tracks
- 10
- Loudness
- -12.3 LUFS
- True peak
- -1.6 dBTP
The prompt
/wavelength I'd like to make a trance song. It should start off extremely slow with a minor arpeggiation. It should crank up the speed like a pump getting faster and faster until a regular pace. Use extreme effects like sidechaining, or filtering everything so it sounds underwater for part of a measure then normal. Should feel like a train getting faster and faster with a wild dance party. Keep the chords very rhythmic, almost boring. Maybe 1 or 3 different chords... almost like it's a half made song. Let the filters expanding and contracting do the work to carry the sound through something that feels different even though the melody feels the same.
The track
Express to Nowhere starts at 32 BPM with a lone arpeggio and speeds up like a pump, a tempo ramp every four bars, until it locks at 140 on bar 25. The harmony is left half-made on purpose: A minor alone for sixteen bars, then Am, F and E in one loop with the same sixteenth-note stab rhythm to the end. The arpeggio pattern never changes once.
What carries the song is one filter over the whole train. Every track runs through a group bus whose low-pass drops everything underwater for part of a bar and snaps back open, closes for a tunnel, wobbles faster and faster in the build and turns into wah-wah in the party. Under it, the kick pumps the music bus by up to 18 dB, a bitcrusher chews two bars, and tape stops brake the train into the drop and at the end.
| Time | Section | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 0:01 | Station | A lone minor arpeggio over a pad at 32 BPM, muffled as if heard through a wall. The tempo starts to pump upward every four bars. |
| 0:48 | Departure | The kick chugs in, the hats start their train rhythm, and the chord stabs begin the one rhythm they keep all song. Still only A minor. |
| 1:15 | Acceleration | F and E finally appear, the bass and clap come in, and the tempo ramps from 98 to 140 under a rising noise sweep. |
| 1:31 | Arrival | Locked at 140. The whole train drops underwater for part of every bar and snaps back open, the first half of the bar, then the second. The supersaw joins at bar 33. |
| 1:58 | Tunnel | The kick leaves. A resonant filter closes over everything and opens by itself, slowly, as the train goes through the tunnel. |
| 2:12 | Build | The filter wobbles faster and surfaces, then holds open for the last four bars under a snare roll and riser. A tape-stop brake squeals into the drop. |
| 2:26 | Party | Galloping bass, supersaws and the kick pumping the music by 18 dB. Wah-wah on the whole train, then two bars bitcrushed down to 6 bits. |
| 2:53 | Last Run | The same wild party with underwater cuts on every other bar. |
| 3:07 | Fade | The filter closes, the pad returns, and a tape stop brings the train to a halt. |
How an agent sees it
render --png draws it: sections and bars, the loudness contour, a spectrogram of the mix, and every track's notes over its level.Instruments and patches
Synths (CLAP factory presets by name)
| Track | Patch | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Arp | Altitude: PL Trance Break 1 | One sixteenth-note arpeggio shape from the first bar to the last |
| Chords | Surge XT: Viva La Trance | Stabs in one fixed rhythm, almost boring on purpose |
| Bass | Surge XT: Trance Seq Bass (+12 semitones) | Off-beat eighths, then a gallop in the party |
| Supersaw | Surge XT: 96 Osc Supersaw | The arp an octave up in eighths for the arrival and the party |
| Pad | Altitude: PD Hyperpad | The station, the tunnel and the fade |
Samples and built-ins
| Track | Source | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Kick | Legend 909 kit (built-in sampler) | Four-on-the-floor, and the trigger for the pumping |
| Drums | Legend 909 kit (built-in sampler) | Train-rhythm hats, clap, open hats, ride, crashes |
| Snare Roll | 909 snare played chromatically (built-in sampler) | The build roll, rising in pitch and speed |
| Noise Sweep | White noise through an automated band-pass filter | Risers into the arrival, the drop and the fade |
| FX | Built-in FX | Risers, impacts, reverse swells, sub drops |
Mix and master
- Routing: melodic tracks feed a Music bus, and Music and the drums feed a Train bus, so one filter moves the whole song.
- Train bus: a resonant low-pass with 148 automation points (underwater dips, the tunnel, the build wobble, wah-wah), a bitcrusher for bars 70-71 and a tape stop into the drop.
- Music bus: ducked from the kick, 3 dB at the station rising to 18 dB in the party.
- Shared effects: a Hall reverb (3.5 s), a dotted-eighth Echo and a short Room.
- Master: a glue compressor (1.8:1), a soft clipper, a tape stop at the end and a true-peak limiter at -1.5 dB.
- One second of silence before the song for streaming platforms.
Download the song
The whole song in one file: the job Wavelength renders, the script that wrote it, its notes, every revision and the review comments, in the open song format. Render it, change it, or ask your agent to make it its own:
wavelength render express-to-nowhere.wavelength
wavelength unpack express-to-nowhere.wavelengthTracks whose plugins you don't have play built-in stand-ins, so it renders on any computer; with the same plugins it sounds as you hear it here.
Download express-to-nowhere.wavelength 14.3 MB · Licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: share and remix it, credit the song.