Dreamwave

What it is

Valerie, a small Paris label, put out records by College, Anoraak and Electric Youth from 2007 onward, and that catalogue is where the soft end of this whole revival comes from. Where synthwave takes its cues from a car chase, dreamwave takes them from the closing credits: mid tempo, major sevenths, a breathy vocal, and a lyric about summer that is really about a summer twenty years earlier. The drums are the same LinnDrum sample set as everything else in this family, but the figure is stripped back to almost nothing so the shaker and the pad can carry the movement. Beat 1 and beat 3 for the kick, backbeat on 2 and 4, and no fills until the last bar of a section.

What it sounds like

Soft, wide and slightly out of focus. The kick is a LinnDrum sample with the tuning knob up, so it reads more like a tom than a bass drum, and it is mixed politely. Snare is gated but with a much longer reverb than synthwave uses, around 2.5 seconds cut at 400ms, so it blooms rather than detonates. A cabasa or shaker runs sixteenths under everything at a very low level and is the reason the tracks feel like they are moving. Pads are Juno-106 with the chorus at setting one, bass is a DX7 electric-piano patch playing root notes, and the vocal is doubled, chorused and mixed low. The whole thing sits behind a shelf at 10kHz.

Key elements

• The sixteenth shakerConstant, quiet, and the only thing in the arrangement running faster than eighths. Remove it and the track stops moving entirely.
• A kick on 1 and 3 onlyNo pushes, no sixteenths, nothing on the offbeats. Restraint here is what lets the reverb tails on everything else stay audible.
• Long gated snareA 2.5 second plate gated at around 400ms rather than 220ms. Twice the tail of a synthwave snare, and it changes the whole feel of the same figure.
• Simmons toms as the fillAn SDS-V tom run descending across the last beat of a section, pitched down as it goes. It is the only fill in most of these records.
• Major seventh harmonyLush four-note chords held for two bars each on a chorused Juno. This is where dreamwave separates from the minor-key rest of the family.

How to get them

• Program the shaker firstSixteenths, accent on the beat, half that on the and, a third on the e and the a, sitting around minus 26. Build the rest of the drums to it.
• Tune the kick upPitch a LinnDrum kick up two semitones and high-pass at 70Hz. It should feel like a floor tom rather than a bass drum, which is what these records do.
• Lengthen the gatePlate at 2.5 seconds, gate hold 400ms, release 40ms rather than 5ms so the cut is soft. That soft release is the difference from the synthwave setting.
• One fill per sectionSimmons toms on the last beat, three or four hits descending, each pitched a tone lower than the last with a 1.5 second gated plate on them.
• Chorus the pad, not the mixJuno chorus on the pad only, then a 3 second hall at 25 percent wet with the return high-passed at 500Hz. Leave the drums out of both.
• Bury the vocalDouble it, pan the double 30 percent each way, low-pass the double at 6kHz and sit the pair four decibels lower than sounds right.

Reference points

College, Anoraak, Electric Youth, Sunglasses Kid, The Midnight, FM-84, and the Valerie Collective catalogue out of Paris. Reference points for the sound, not endorsements.