The sound of Goa Trance
Goa Trance is essentially "dance-trance" music (it was referred to as "Trance Dance" in its formative years), the original goal being to assist the dancers in experiencing a collective state of bodily transcendence, similar to that of ancient shamanic dancing rituals, through hypnotic, pulsing melodies and rhythms. As such it has an energetic beat, almost always in 4/4 time and mainly consisting of 16th or 32nd note patterns played in both synth and percussion parts. A typical track will generally build up to a much more energetic movement in the second half then taper off fairly quickly toward the end. The BPM typically lies in the 130 - 150 range, although some tracks may have BPMs as low as 110 or as high as 160. Generally 8-12 minutes long, Goa Trance tracks tend to focus on steadily building energy throughout, using changes in percussion patterns and more intricate and layered synth parts as the music progresses in order to build a hypnotic and intense feel.
The kick drum often is a low, thick sound with a large amount of sub-bass frequencies, and is thought to be the origin of the term doof, a label for dance music and Goa Trance in particular. The music very often incorporates a great deal of effects, much more so than other forms of dance music, and are often created through experimentation with synthesisers. A well-known sound that originated with Goa Trance and became much more prevalent through its successor, psytrance, is the organic "squelchy" sound (usually a saw-wave which is run through a high-pass resonance filter), known to sound especially good on psychedelic drugs.
Other important pieces of equipment used in Goa Trance include popular analogue synthesizers such as the Roland TB-303, Roland Juno-60/106, Novation Bass-Station, Korg MS-10, and notably the Roland SH-101. Hardware samplers manufactured by Akai, Yamaha and Ensoniq were also popular for sample storage and manipulation.
A popular element of Goa Trance is the use of strange samples, often from sci-fi movies. Those samples mostly contain references to drugs, parapsychology, extraterrestrials, existentialism, OBEs, dreams, science, spirituality and other things that could be deemed as "mysterious" and "unconventional". For an extensive list of such samples, see