piano Digital Piano App

Trance Strings

Mode

Normal Auto-chord

Synthesized strings are a very important component of the genre of Trance music, and Electronic Music in general. They feature prominently in many of the biggest and most successful hits such as Adagio for Strings by Tiësto and Sandstorm by Darude.

Synthesized strings allow producers to create an orchestral sounding effect, without the difficulties that come with having a real life group of musicians - a real orchestral string section can contain upwards of 30 people.

Synthesized strings allow you to approximate this sound on a keyboard far more simply, albeit at the expense of some of the acoustic nuance of the real instruments. Nevertheless, synth strings have a characteristic sound of their own, which has become very closely associated with the genre of Trance music.

We’re paying homage to this with our online instrument Trance Strings, which you can play right here online for free.

Trance Strings can be used to play any sort of strings melody (it doesn’t have to be Trance) such as the iconic motif from Fatboy Slim’s Right Here, Right Now.

And while not exactly trance music in the truest sense of the word, it would be remiss of us not to mention one of the first “proto” trance songs: Donna Summer’s I Feel Love, co-written by electronic music pioneer Giorgio Moroder back in 1977. The piece, far ahead of its time, has a string synth playing a sustained chord over the song’s iconic driving bassline.

Trance Strings can be played in one of two modes:

• Normal mode
• Auto-chord mode

In Normal mode (which is the default), playing a note will sound a single note as you would perhaps intuitively expect. This is in contrast to Auto-chord mode. In this mode, when you play a note, Trance Strings automatically creates a chord to accompany the chosen note to allow you to easily create chord progressions that are rich with harmony.

To play Trance Strings, you can click on the keyboard notes with your mouse or tap with your finger if you’re on a touch device. Additionally, you can press the keys on your Qwerty keyboard, and furthermore, it is also compatible with USB-Midi devices, so once you plug one in, you will be able to play with your existing Midi hardware.