Best Synths for Making Trance

Robert Miles stuff aka “Dream Trance” or “Dream House” was made using a Kurzweil K2000 with mainly just a sample rom and the now legendary sampled “Acoustic Piano” patch that defined an entire genre.

Nowadays you could use about any synth, really. You may want to look for “bread and butter” sounds that are included, such as in:

• Falcon
• Halion
• Serum (some additional patch libraries necessary)
• Rapid (additional patch libraries)
• Hive 2, Nectar
• Reason comes with loads of synths and onboard sounds
• Omnisphere, Arturia, Korg Collection…
• Tone2 Icarus
• Nexus by reFX really I am just listing stuff you can find on kvraudio and pluginboutique at this point 🙂
• OR just get a Motif 😛

If you are on a tight budget, you can try these:

• UVI Workstation (aka “Falcon Light”) with Addons
• Halion SE (comes included with Cubase)
• Xpand!2
• Tx16Wx (in conjunction with various free soundfonts)
• TAL Sampler
• SurgeXT (free)
• Vital (free version)
• DecentSampler (free)
• Meldaproduction has something for everything and they are quite affordable

Korg M1 VST is a great choice for those classic 90s presets.

Really if you are ready to make your own sounds, any synth should be fine. But here are a few that come to mind as good for trance:

• Oatmeal – r/OatmealVST – one of the best free synths that has a big sound for a small CPU footprint
• Mausynth – very nice character of sound – warm
• MinimogueVA-TD – maybe the best free Minimoog clone
• Superwave P8 – good for trancy pads
• OddyFree – the Arp Odyssey is a really cool architecture that can make some really unusual sounds
• Arppe2600 – again the weird architecture makes for some unusual sounds
• HG Fortune synths are soundfont based and are good for atmosphere

https://www.reddit.com/r/VSTi/comments/1evtivn/whats_the_best_synth_for_making_trance_music/