What is Trance?

Trance is a type of dance music. Due to the perceived stigma of disco, dance music is not popular in the US. It's barely mentioned in newspapers, the media, even MTV, and when it is , it's oftent he object of jokes. So most people in the US are unaware how deep and varied the genre of dance music is. It's as deep as any, if not deeper, than any genre I know.

Central to the idea of dance music, is the DJ. A DJ is someone takes dance music, and plays several songs together continuously without a pause or seam between them. This isn't terribly hard, but it more complicated than you might think. Each song has a certain speed or tempo it plays at. Usually this is described as a number of beats per minute (bmp). In order to make two songs seamless, a DJ must make sure both songs are playing at the same bpm. This is done by varying the pitch of the cd or record. Once that is done, you have to get the beats in phase. Other wise it sounds very very odd.

Besides that, a DJ structures or orders the songs so there is a flow and greater structure to them.

Anyway, getting back to trance and what is sounds like. It's typically fast, about 130-145 beats per minute (bpm). (By contrast, a fast paced rock or pop song is around 90-100 bpm.). It's usually lush, with sort of symphonic sounds, and melody driven. I say usually, because the bit thing now is trance that's almost like techno - no melody, no lushness, 'darker'. Doesn't too much for me, but some swear by it.

The closest thing to trance you've probably heard is the 80s stuff by the Moody Blues. That's not unlike trance, although slower and trance tends not to have guitars.

The best trance DJs are (IMHO), Tiesto, Paul Oakenfold, and Paul Van Dyk.

A really short primer on other dance music

As I saidA lot of people don't realize that electronic dance music is a huge, huge, huge category, stylistically, and it often gets simply called 'techno'. But basically that's like calling call music made by a guitar, drums, bass guitar and ______ 'rock'. Wrong.

Big Beat is probably the most popular in the US - it's best known artists are Fatboy Slim & the Chemical brothers.

House is probably the oldest still going. It's pretty much a direct descendent of disco. It's faster (120 bpm or so), but still fairly recognizable as disco. The big thing is England right now is hard house, which is really fast (150 bpm or so) and with harder beats.

Techno probably has the most popular name. It's mostly from Detroit, which is sort of funny, because IMHO, it's pretty much the opposite of the other prominent type of music from detroit ('Mo-town'). It's a fairly spartan sort of music - there's generally not much of a melody, well there is sometimes, but it's mostly formed by the beats themselves. Jeff Mills, Joey Beltram, Derrick May, Juan Atkins,

Industrial is probably the second most (or even the most) popular in the US. It perhaps borders on being rock, sometimes guitar driven but often not. Its somewhat noisy. It's usually fast, and agressive, violent sounding. Ministry before their MTV days but after their synthpop days is the best example of industrial. And later minstry, as well as NIN, Machines of Loving Grace are what I call industrial-pop.

Ambient - This is sort of like the music they play at the Epcot Center, or not too different from some new age.

There are dozens, if not hundreds of other genres. It continues to amaze me just how much variety there is. Yet in the US, all we hear on the radio is the same old junk - various types of rock & country, with some rap/hip-hop.

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