Darksynth

What it is

Carpenter Brut released the first of three EPs in 2012 and Perturbator put out I Am the Night in the same year, and between them they turned a nostalgia scene into something that could headline a metal festival. The reference is not Miami Vice, it is Goblin, John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 and the score to a video nasty. Drums are where it separates hardest from the rest of synthwave: instead of a rock backbeat, the kick runs straight eighths through the whole bar like a motorik pulse with the distortion up, and the hats fill the sixteenths between them. It is closer to industrial than to Italo, and a lot of the audience arrived from that direction rather than from vaporwave.

What it sounds like

Saturated to the point of clipping and proud of it. The kick is a 909 or a sampled acoustic pushed through waveshaping until the transient is squared off, then high-passed at 60Hz so eighths do not pile up. Snare is a gated eighties sample run through distortion and a bitcrusher, which keeps the size and removes the politeness. Hats are short, bright, and often just a noise burst. The synths are detuned saw stacks with the resonance high enough to whistle, a bass that is really a second lead, and long analogue delay on the leads. There is a horror organ in most of these tracks and it is usually mixed too loud, which is correct.

Key elements

• Eighth-note kickA pulse rather than a groove, running through the bar. It is the single feature that separates a darksynth grid from every other synthwave grid on this site.
• Distorted gated snareThe eighties gate is still there, but the sample goes through waveshaping and a bitcrusher first, so it arrives torn rather than glossy.
• Hats between the kicksClosed hats on the offbeat sixteenths only, filling the gaps the kick leaves. Doubling them onto the eighths turns the whole thing to porridge.
• Resonant saw stacksThree or four detuned saws with the low-pass resonance around 70 percent and the cutoff automated by hand. This is the horror-score sound.
• Crash as punctuationA single loud crash on the downbeat of a section and again on beat 3 of the last bar. Used as an edit point rather than as a cymbal.

How to get them

• Shape the kick909 kick into a hard clipper at about 6dB of gain reduction, then a high-pass at 60Hz and a transient shaper adding 4dB of attack. Check it in eighths, not one at a time.
• Wreck the snareTake a gated LinnDrum snare, run it through 8-bit reduction and a soft-clip stage, then re-gate at 200ms. Keep a dry layer underneath for the transient.
• Hats on the offbeatsSixteenths only where the kick is not: the e and the a of every beat. Keep them at a fixed level and let the kick provide the accents.
• Bass as a leadTwo saws a cent apart, low-pass at 400Hz with resonance at 60 percent, playing a riff rather than a root. Distort it separately from the kick.
• Automate the cutoff by handDraw the filter sweep across sixteen bars rather than using an envelope. The unevenness is what makes it sound performed rather than generated.
• Master into a limiterAim for a mix that is already dense at minus 8 LUFS before the limiter, then take another 3dB. Dynamics are not what this music is for.

Reference points

Carpenter Brut, Perturbator, Gost, Dan Terminus, Volkor X, Wice, and the Blood Music and Blood Machines catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not endorsements.