Synthwave

What it is

Kavinsky put out Nightcall in 2010, Drive used it in 2011, and a scene that had been trading tracks on a handful of French blogs since about 2006 became a genre with a name and a colour scheme. The music is a reconstruction of an eighties that was mostly Tangerine Dream, John Carpenter and Harold Faltermeyer, filtered through people who mostly experienced it on VHS. What matters for the drums is that the eighties records being copied were made on a LinnDrum or an Oberheim DMX, and those machines came with a fixed set of samples and a small set of preset patterns. So a synthwave beat is usually a rock beat, and the work is entirely in the sound of it: the tuning, the gate, the reverb, the fact that the snare is drowned rather than played differently.

What it sounds like

The snare is the whole genre. A LinnDrum sample, tuned down two or three semitones, into a bright plate of about 1.8 seconds, then gated so the tail cuts off dead at around 250ms. That is the Hugh Padgham trick from 1980, and it is what makes a straightforward backbeat sound enormous. Kicks are short and mid-heavy with very little below 60Hz, because the machines they came from had none. Hats are dull and quiet. Over that: a Juno-106 pad with the chorus on, a Jupiter brass stab, a bass on a Moog doubled by a slap sample, and a lead with a slow portamento. Everything is wide, everything has chorus, and the top end is rolled off around 12kHz to imitate tape.

Key elements

• Gated reverb on the snareA plate of 1.5 to 2 seconds cut by a gate at 200 to 300ms with almost no release. It is the single sound that dates a record to 1984 in one hit.
• A LinnDrum, not a kitTwelve-bit samples with a tuning knob per voice and no velocity beyond the pads. That fixed palette is why so many of these records share a snare.
• Kick with no subBody around 90Hz and a click at 2kHz, with a high-pass at 55Hz. Adding modern sub weight is the fastest way to lose the period entirely.
• Chorused everythingThe Juno-106 chorus at setting two on the pad, a separate chorus on the bass, and a third on the lead. Stacked chorus is the width in these mixes.
• Arpeggios in sixteenthsA Jupiter or Prophet arpeggiator running sixteenths under the whole track, so movement comes from the synth rather than from the drum part.

How to get them

• Build the gateSend the snare to a plate at 1.8 seconds, 100 percent wet on a return, and put a gate on the return with hold 220ms, release 5ms and threshold set so it opens on every hit. Blend to taste against a dry snare.
• Tune the snare downPitch a LinnDrum or DMX snare sample down two or three semitones before the reverb. That is what separates a synthwave snare from an eighties pop snare using the same sample.
• Keep the kick smallHigh-pass at 55Hz, peak at 90Hz, and a 2kHz click of about 8ms. If it feels thin in isolation it is probably right in the mix.
• Leave the hats behindEighths at around minus 22, low-passed at 8kHz, dry. The hats are timekeeping, not texture, and every dB you add to them costs the snare.
• Sidechain the pad, not the bassDuck the pad 3dB off the kick with a 200ms release and leave the bass alone. That is the opposite of the house convention and it is why these tracks breathe slowly.
• Roll off the topA gentle shelf taking 3dB off above 12kHz on the master, plus light tape saturation. It puts everything behind the same pane of glass.

Reference points

Kavinsky, College, Com Truise, Mitch Murder, Miami Nights 1984, Lazerhawk, and the Valerie and Rosso Corsa catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.