The dynamic analysis of trusses using the finite element method tends to overlook the effect of local member dynamic behavior on the overall response of the complete structure. This is due to the fact that the lateral inertias of the members are omitted from the global inertia terms in the structure mass matrix. In this paper a condensed dynamic stiffness matrix is formulated and used to calculate the exact dynamic properties of trusses without the need to increase the model size. In the examples the limitations of current solutions are presented together with the exact results obtained from the proposed method.