Dawnbreaker
2000s uplifting trance in F minor, made entirely with free synthesizers: a hypersaw anthem, a rolling bass, a 303 acid line and a piano breakdown.
- Key
- F minor
- Tempo
- 138 BPM
- Length
- 3:37
- Tracks
- 17
- Loudness
- -13.1 LUFS
- True peak
- -1.5 dBTP
The prompt
/wavelength Can you make a trance 2000s era song using these new instruments?
The track
Dawnbreaker is uplifting trance the way it was made around 2004 to 2007: a 909 kick with a rolling sixteenth bass after every beat, supersaw chords pumping against the kick, a plucked arp through a dotted-eighth echo, a long breakdown and a hypersaw anthem. Every melodic sound comes from free plugins installed for this song: Vaporizer2, Zebralette 3, FB-02, FB3, JC303 and Firefly Synth 2.
The song has one eight-bar progression (Fm, Fm, Db, Db, Ab, Ab, Eb, C) and one theme. The FB3 piano plays it alone in the breakdown while FM bells and a choir fill in behind. A snare roll builds into two beats of reverb and a reverse swell, then the theme returns as the anthem on the hypersaws, doubled an octave up by Zebralette 3 the second time round.
The sounds were chosen with patch cards: pictures of how each preset sounds, drawn by wavelength card from one probe phrase. They showed which leads sound an octave down, which plucks retrigger on their own, and later why the first pluck sounded like a duck (a resonant formant sweep on every note) and why the acid line bled out of key (a wrong note in its pattern, not the synth).
| Time | Section | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 0:01 | Intro | A 909 kick with a Firefly Synth 2 sub under it and a Juno-style pad. Closed hats and the rolling bass arrive at bar 9, the bass filtered almost shut. |
| 0:29 | Groove | Clap, open hats and the bass opening up. At bar 21 the JC303 acid line comes in, its filter and resonance creeping open. |
| 0:57 | Main | Supersaw chords pump against the kick, the Tribute pluck plays the sixteenth arp through the echo, and a ride lifts the last eight bars. |
| 1:24 | Breakdown | The beat stops. The FB3 piano plays the theme over broken chords; from bar 57 FM bells, a choir and Zebralette 3 join, doubling the theme. |
| 1:52 | Build | A 909 snare roll speeds up from quarter notes to 32nds while the hypersaw lead opens under a noise sweep and a riser. Then two beats where only the reverb, the echoes and a reverse swell are left. |
| 2:06 | Drop A | The hypersaw anthem with its sharper layer, the pumping chords, rolling bass, pluck and choir. |
| 2:34 | Drop B | The theme's second pass lifts at its end, Zebralette 3 doubles it an octave up, the bells return and the acid comes back underneath. |
| 3:02 | Outro | The leads and pads drop out, leaving acid, bass, pluck and chords for DJs to mix out of. From bar 113 it stays on F minor. |
| 3:23 | Outro 2 | Kick, bass and hats alone. The bass holds F while everything fades over the last eight bars. |
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 (free CLAP plugins, factory presets by name)
| Track | Patch | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Lead | Vaporizer2: SY Basic Hypersaw (+12 semitones) | The anthem: filtered open through the build, the theme in both drops |
| Lead Layer | Vaporizer2: LD Sharp Layer (+12 semitones) | Bite on top of the anthem |
| Lead Octave | Zebralette 3: Four by Two | Doubles the theme in the breakdown, an octave up in drop B |
| Chords | Vaporizer2: PD Fake Saw (+12 semitones) | Supersaw chords, one a bar, pumping against the kick |
| Pad | Vaporizer2: PD Juno Dream Pad | Held chords in the intro, breakdown and drops |
| Choir | Vaporizer2: SY Vapo Choir | The trance choir from the second half of the breakdown |
| Pluck | Vaporizer2: PL Tribute | The sixteenth arp through the echo |
| Bass | Vaporizer2: BA Psytrance Bass (+12 semitones) | Rolling sixteenths after every kick, ducked by it; holds F through the fade |
| Acid | JC303 | A two-bar 303 pattern with accents and slides, its cutoff and resonance ridden through the groove and drop B |
| Piano | FB3: Piano II (+12 semitones) | The breakdown theme over a broken-chord left hand |
| Bells | FB-02: BellCel | FM celesta eighths in the breakdown and drop B |
| Kick Sub | Firefly Synth 2: Kick03 | A synth sub under the 909 kick |
Samples and built-ins
| Track | Source | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Kick | Legend 909 kit (built-in sampler) | Four-on-the-floor, and the trigger for sidechain ducking |
| Drums | Legend 909 kit (built-in sampler) | Clap, closed and open hats, ride, crashes, tom fills |
| 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 | Sweeps into and out of each section |
| FX | Built-in FX | Risers, impacts, the reverse swell into the drop |
Mix and master
- Faders set from each track's measured loudness against per-track targets, then ridden so the breakdown opens about 5 dB under the drops and grows.
- Sidechain ducking from the kick: chords 11 dB, bass 10, pad and choir 4, acid 5, pluck 4, bells and leads 2 to 3.
- Shared effects: a Hall reverb (3.8 s), a dotted-eighth Echo and a short Room. At the breath before the drop the tracks stop but the reverb and echoes ring on under a reverse swell.
- Master: a 25 Hz high-pass, a gentle glue compressor (1.8:1) and a true-peak limiter at -1.5 dB.
- Every track has a level-matched built-in fallback, so the song file renders on a computer without these plugins.
- 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 dawnbreaker.wavelength
wavelength unpack dawnbreaker.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 dawnbreaker.wavelength 15.2 MB · Licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0: share and remix it, credit the song.