How To Make Trance Like Markus Schulz | Live Electronic Music Tutorial 340

How to Make Trance Like Markus Schulz — A Tech-Trance Production Walkthrough

In Episode 340 of our live electronic music tutorials, Mikas goes back to his roots with a 130 BPM progressive, dreamy tech-trance track in the style of Markus Schulz. Working in Logic Pro, he builds it in real time — a big, rumbling bassline, raw percussion, bendy pads, plucked sequences and a Serum-driven lead — explaining every move as he goes.

What you’ll learn

• Programming a simple, punchy trance beat with two kicks, snare, claps and hats
• Turning a melodic-house bassline into a tech-trance rumble with compression and pumping
• Splitting a bass into a mono low end and a stereo top using parallel bus routing
• Recording clean, linear pitch-bend automation on pads — and avoiding stuck CC values
• Designing pads, plucks and arp-style sequences with Serum and Sylenth1
• Using sidechain, filter automation and sample-delay tricks to glue the groove together

1. Start with a simple trance beat

The foundation is a quick, no-frills beat. Mikas layers a top kick that’s plucky and present with a second, sub-heavy kick for weight — a very “Above & Beyond” combination, using the Above & Beyond drum kit in Logic. On top of that sits a short, snappy snare, claps with a touch of delay dropped in here and there, and a single hat. Nothing complicated — the simplicity is the point, leaving room for the sound design to carry the track.

2. Build the bassline and make it pump

Rather than start from scratch, he repurposes a rumbly bassline originally built for melodic house. To lock it into the groove he drops a compressor on it with a fast attack, fast release and a 4:1 ratio, driving a clear pumping motion. He tunes everything to the key of the sub kick so the low end stays in tune, then tames the filter and the metallic resonance that’s a little too aggressive for the track.

3. Split the bass into mono lows and stereo highs

A key engineering trick: the bass feels off-center, which is odd for a low-end element. Mikas sends it to one bus that he mono’s for the low frequencies, then to a second stereo bus where he drops the low end and keeps only the top. The result — tight, mono sub-bass with a wide stereo top — from a single source feeding two parallel buses, with reverb and delay shaping the tail.

4. Add a bendy top pad with pitch-bend automation

For movement up top, he records a little bendy pad through a big trance reverb bus. The pitch-bend automation is drawn in deliberately linear and stable instead of left as jittery recorded dots. Important caveat he flags live: you have to add a reset point back to zero at the start, otherwise an old stuck CC value keeps the pitch bent. His advice — use pitch bends as an occasional effect, not on every part or every beat.

5. Craft plucks and a Serum pad

Next come a plucked sequence and a deeper background pad. He opens the pluck up a touch and places a few hits in an interesting, spacey sequence, experimenting with bends in and out and following them with chords. For the background pad he reaches for Serum, again routed through the big reverb bus, building from the bottom up into something cosmic and rich — staying in a similar key to keep things simple, since this style leans more on sound design than complex composition.

6. Layer extra percussion from a 909 kit

To enhance the groove he loads a second 909 kit alongside the first, swapping in a 909 snare he prefers and adding a rolling hat that fills every step the original hat leaves open. Then he isolates just the top of a hat and uses a sample delay — around 20 ms on one side, 10 ms on the other — so the hats sit slightly off the beat and interact differently with the stereo space.

7. Find a trance sequence in Serum

Hunting for a driving arp-style part, he browses Serum’s sequencer presets until he lands on an intense, rhythmic sequence built from the synth’s LFOs and matrix routing. He adds a sidechain to make it duck under the kick, then automates filter A and B, pushing resonance and panning the filter for motion before cutting and shaping the noise source to sit it in the mix.

8. Record the lead and a chord progression

Finally he records a lead in Serum — something spacey, simple but rich — auditioning presets and melodies until one fits the vibe. He duplicates the MIDI to explore alternates, drops the bass into a gap to fill out the arrangement, and settles on a chord/key progression. From here it gets expanded to a full four-minute arrangement, mixed and turned into the finished template.

Get the project file: this session became a full Markus Schulz-style trance template for Logic Pro, Ableton Live and FL Studio, including the sounds and arrangement built here. Download the template →