Synth flute with Serum
The flute sound in the track is a synth patch created in Xfer Records Serum. “It’s basically just a sine wave with a hell of a lot of noise that’s gone through a lot of distortion. It runs through this vibrato plugin – because it’s not a real flute, we’re doing everything that we can to make it sound real,” explains Robbie. He applies Serum’s Filter FX in reverb mode, which changes the character of the sound: “You can change the cutoff on the reverb filter to get all sorts of weirdness. You can also automate it to come up with all sorts of crazy stuff. It’s good for making sounds weirder, which is what we needed in this case, because the sound was sounding very dry and basic.” Serum’s Distortion effect is also applied to rough the sound up, then Robbie uses Live’s EQ Eight to attenuate the signal’s low end. More distortion comes courtesy of OhmForce Ohmicide, and then the signal is multiband-compressed with Xfer Records OTT, ducked with Nicky Romero Kickstart, reverbed with ValhallaDSP ValhallaRoom, and delayed with Live’s Ping Pong Delay.