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1. Synthesising a dreamy, 80s-style polysynth

1 Huge, 80s-style polysynth patches are synonymous with synthwave, so some form of virtual analogue softsynth is a must-have. We’ll be using the freeware OB-Xd to create our patch – get it at obxd. wordpress.com. Load an instance into a new channel in your DAW. We’ll begin by setting up our raw tone, so head to the oscillator section… 2 By default, both oscillators are set to the same octave range. If we pitch Oscillator 2 up by one octave, we’ll give definition to the notes for a bigger sound. To achieve this, move osc 2’s Frequency dial to 25. While we’re here, dirty the sound up a bit by turning the Noise dial to 50. It sounds a bit dull, though, so we’ll use the filter to brighten things up. 3 Higher notes are getting lost. To combat this, click the button labelled Key to turn on filter keytracking. This opens the filter as we play up the keyboard. It’s a bit too bright now, so turn the filter Cutoff dial down to 25 to smooth things off, and add bite by turning the Resonance control to 20. To dial in filter envelope modulation, turn the Envelope control to 20. 4 Now to the Filter Envelope section. A slight filter fade-in will give us an 80s feel, but we’d also like it to stay where it is when a note is held. To make this happen, change Attack to 25, Decay to 55, Sustain to 35 and Release to 65. In the Loudness Envelope, set Attack to 10, Decay to 40, Sustain to 60 and Release to 60 to shape the amplitude over time. 5 Let’s modulate things with the LFO. Head to the Modulation section and click the Sine button to add in a sine wave LFO. In the Frequency section, click the Osc1, Osc2 and Filter buttons to route the LFO to these areas. Turn the Rate dial (which controls the speed) and Depth dial (which controls the amount) up to 12 to hear the LFO gently bend the sound and move the filter. 6 To get a real 80s feel, we’ll next add chorus and reverb. In FL Studio, we send the track to a mixer insert – for other DAWS, place the effects after OB-Xd in the chain. Drop in an instance of TAL-Chorus-LX (from tal-software.com) and leave it at the default setting. Next drop in a reverb with a long decay time. Here we’re using Eventide Blackhole ( eventideaudio.com) for enormous ambience and width.