Full Name: Matthew Timothy William Steeper
Origin: Canada
Based: Los Angeles, California, USA
Roles: Producer, Songwriter, Vocalist, Vocal Producer, Educator, Label Co-founder
Labels / Companies: Golden Thread Music (co-founder), DAW Nation
Key Credits: Gareth Emery & Standerwick (“Saving Light”), Seven Lions (“Horizon,” “Don’t Wanna Fall”), Slander (“Walk On Water,” “Wish I Could Forget”), Tritonal (“Long Way Home”), Armin van Buuren, HALIENE (full catalogue)
Awards: Grammy-nominated (Illenium\’s Fallen Embers), Platinum producer (Slander’s “Love Is Gone Acoustic\”)
The Invisible Architecture
Every great voice in trance and melodic electronic music has a story in front of the microphone. Behind almost every great voice, there is someone making sure the room sounds right before the singer walks in — someone who knows how a melody should breathe, how a lyric earns its emotional weight, and how a vocal production becomes something more than a technical exercise. Matthew Steeper is that person. He has described himself, with characteristic self-awareness, as one of the most pivotal forces in dance music you\’ve never heard of. That description is both accurate and slightly insufficient. The credits tell a different story — one of a Canadian songwriter and producer who quietly embedded himself at the centre of some of the most emotionally resonant music the trance and melodic bass world has produced over the past decade.
The Songwriter’s Entry Point
Matthew Steeper is Canadian by origin and Los Angeles by adoption — a path that many singer-songwriters of his generation followed as the city consolidated its position as the global hub of the music industry\’s commercial and creative infrastructure. His background is in songwriting and vocal production, disciplines that sit at a different angle to the DJ-producer pipeline that dominates electronic music\’s public face. Where most names in trance are defined by their productions and DJ sets, Steeper arrived from the craft end: the writing room, the vocal booth, the process of turning a melody into a lyric that actually means something.
His specific expertise is in vocal production — the technical and musical process of capturing a singer\’s performance, shaping it sonically, and integrating it into a track so that the voice and the production feel inseparable. In trance, where a great vocal can transform a record from a dancefloor tool into a genuine anthem, that skill is among the most valuable available. Steeper recognised this earlier than most.
Saving Light: Writing the Room (2016–2017)
The record that announced Steeper to the broader trance community came from a writing session that Gareth Emery arranged at his home studio in November 2016. Emery brought together Roxanne Emery, HALIENE, KARRA, and Matthew Steeper — the kind of concentrated talent concentration that occasionally produces something genuinely exceptional rather than merely good. What emerged from that session was \”Saving Light.\”
Steeper is credited as co-composer, co-lyricist, and co-writer on the release, under his full name Matthew Timothy William Steeper. The song — built around HALIENE\’s soaring vocal and a lyric explicitly addressing bullying, its consequences, and the act of being someone\’s lifeline — reached number one on the Beatport overall chart in February 2017, the first trance record to achieve that in five years. Armin van Buuren\’s A State of Trance audience voted it Tune of the Year for 2017, and it was later ranked number 12 in the ASOT Top 1000 — a list that distils the genre\’s entire recorded history to its most cherished moments.
The writing credit on one of the most beloved trance records of the decade is not a footnote. It is the foundation of everything that followed.
The Anatomy of a Trance-Adjacent Career
What makes Steeper\’s position in the world of trance distinctive is the breadth of his reach from a base that is rooted in melody, voice, and songcraft rather than in any single genre\’s production aesthetic. His work crosses between trance and the melodic bass and progressive worlds that share audiences and creative DNA with it, and in doing so he has become a connective tissue figure — the songwriter and vocal producer who appears wherever emotional depth and dancefloor function need to coexist.
His credits across the trance and melodic spectrum include some of the genre\’s most celebrated vocal collaborations:
With Seven Lions — an artist whose music sits deliberately at the intersection of melodic dubstep, trance, and psytrance — he co-wrote “Horizon” and “Don’t Wanna Fall,” two of the producer’s signature tracks with HALIENE, whose vocal he both co-wrote and produced.
With Slander, he co-wrote “Walk On Water” and “Wish I Could Forget” — records that sit within the melodic bass tradition but carry trance\’s emotional architecture in their construction.
With Tritonal, he contributed to “Long Way Home,” a track that appeared across dance radio programming internationally.
His work with Armin van Buuren — the defining figure of trance globally — represents perhaps the most direct line from his songwriting practice into the genre\’s centre of gravity.
In each case, the contribution is the same: the craft underneath the sound. The melody that makes a breakdown memorable. The lyric that gives a trance vocal its specific emotional address. The vocal production that makes a singer\’s performance feel inevitable rather than assembled.
The KARRA Collaboration and Splice
One of Steeper’s most visible contributions to the broader production community came through his collaboration with vocalist KARRA on two of Splice’s most successful vocal sample packs. Splice — the industry-standard platform for sample licensing used by hundreds of thousands of producers worldwide — became a vector for Steeper’s influence to extend far beyond his direct writing credits.
KARRA has credited Steeper specifically as the vocal producer who shaped the processing and character of those packs, describing him as her co-writer who took the reins on vocal production. The packs were subsequently sampled by producers signed to labels including David Guetta’s, Jai Wolf, Kayzo, Da Tweekaz, and many others — meaning Steeper\’s sonic sensibility found its way into records he was never in the room for, carried forward by the architecture of the samples he helped produce.
The KARRA vocal pack series became Splice’s most successful vocal pack releases, which in practical terms means they shaped the sound of a generation of melodic and trance-adjacent productions.
Golden Thread Music and the Live Act
Steeper and HALIENE — who are married — co-founded Golden Thread Music, a boutique production and publishing company that operates both as a creative vehicle and as an artist development platform. Through Golden Thread, they have supported emerging acts including AMIDY and Monika Santucci, functioning as producers and mentors within an ecosystem they built together.
Steeper\’s role in HALIENE\’s live performances extends well beyond co-production in the studio. He is, by the couple\’s own description, the unnamed second half of HALIENE\’s live act — performing piano and handling production duties at festival and club performances worldwide. This includes appearances at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, the Jakarta Colosseum, O2 Academy, and major festival stages across North America, Europe, and Asia. The Grammy nomination that came via Illenium\’s Fallen Embers — on which \”In My Mind\” featuring HALIENE appeared — extended to him as a contributor to a body of work that reached number 22 on the Billboard Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart.
Education and the Golden Vocal System
Alongside his production and songwriting work, Steeper has become a significant presence in music education. He launched a vocal production masterclass through DAW Nation — a platform focused on electronic music production education — and followed it with the Golden Vocal System, a dedicated course framework built around the methodology he has developed over years of professional vocal production in the EDM and trance space.
For a discipline as underserved by formal education as vocal production in electronic music, these resources represent a meaningful contribution to the next generation of producers working in the trance and melodic EDM world. Steeper\’s choice to make his process accessible — rather than keeping it proprietary — reflects both confidence in his own continued creative evolution and a genuine investment in the health of the musical ecosystem he works within.
What Steeper Represents
The trance world has always celebrated its producers and DJs, and rightly so. But some of its most essential creative work has been done by people whose names appear in small print on Discogs and not at all on festival lineups — the writers, the lyricists, the vocal producers who give the music its emotional reason for existing. Matthew Steeper is the most accomplished of that cohort currently working in the trance and melodic electronic space. His Grammy nomination, his Platinum production credit, his ASOT Tune of the Year co-write, and his presence on the records of virtually every significant melodic artist in the genre\’s current generation are a collective statement about where the craft of songwriting sits within trance — and what happens when someone brings it to the genre with complete professional seriousness.
He is, as his own website accurately summarises, the secret weapon of vocal EDM. In trance in particular, where a great vocal can define a record for decades, that is not a modest claim. It is simply the truth.