Sovietwave

What it is

Russian-language internet forums around 2013 started collecting a very specific kind of track: slow, stately synth instrumentals about space, snow and a future that never happened, made by people mostly born after the thing they were nostalgic for had ended. The obvious ancestors are Eduard Artemyev's film scores and the Melodiya electronic catalogue, plus a lot of Soviet television idents. What that means for the drums is that the reference point is a military march rather than a rock beat, and the grid reflects it: grace notes ahead of the backbeat, toms carrying more weight than the hats, and a snare that is rolling rather than cracking. The tempo sits at the slow end of this family and the weight is in the low mids rather than in the sub.

What it sounds like

Wide, cold and reverberant. Snare is a gated eighties sample but pitched high and hit twice, so the grace note and the backbeat blur into a short roll. Toms are Simmons SDS-V hexagons with the pitch bend on, which is the single most identifiable sound in the genre after the choir pad. Kick is soft and deep with a long tail, because at this tempo there is space for one. Hats are almost absent; the offbeats are marked rather than filled. Over the top: a Vangelis-style CS-80 lead with a slow attack, a Juno string pad, and a choir sample from a preset nobody has bothered to hide. Reverb is a 4 second hall on everything at once.

Key elements

• Grace notes before the backbeatA quiet snare on the a before beats 2 and 4, blurring into the hit that follows. That is what makes it read as a march rather than a rock beat.
• Simmons tomsSDS-V hexagonal pads with the pitch sweep set long, used as a melodic voice rather than as fills. They carry more of the bar than the hats do.
• Hats on the offbeats onlyThe and of every beat and nothing else, so the pulse is marked without being filled. Adding downbeat hats turns it into ordinary synth pop.
• The choir presetA stock eighties vocal pad held for four bars at a time under everything. It is unfashionable and it is completely load-bearing here.
• Plagal cadencesThe four chord resolving to the one rather than the five, which is why these tracks sound like hymns and film credits instead of pop songs.

How to get them

• Write the grace notes inA snare at velocity 44 on the a before beats 2 and 4, then the backbeat at 112. Do not flam them with a plugin; two separate hits a sixteenth apart is the sound.
• Set up the tomsSimmons or an analogue tom with a pitch envelope falling a fifth over 400ms, into a 2 second gated plate. Tune three of them a tone apart and play them as a line.
• Long kick, long tailDecay near 500ms, tuned to about 48Hz, uncompressed. At 102 there is time for the tail to be heard, and it is what makes the tempo feel deliberate.
• Offbeat hats onlyThe and of each beat, around minus 24, low-passed at 7kHz. The downbeats stay clear so the kick and the snare roll own them.
• One hall for everythingA 4 second hall on a single bus fed by the drums, pad and lead together, at 30 percent wet. Shared reverb is what makes these mixes cohere.
• Resolve to the fourWrite a four bar loop that goes minor one, flat seven, flat six, four and back. The plagal move at the end is the whole emotional trick.

Reference points

Mayak, Sovetskoye Foto, Molchat Doma at their most electronic, Eduard Artemyev as an ancestor, and the Melodiya electronic catalogue. Named as reference points for the sound, not endorsements.