Authoring a retro wave sound

The sound of 1980s synth pop and its modern revival. It is a bright, wide, slightly detuned analog tone, usually played as chords or stabs, wrapped in a lot of chorus. Two things carry it more than anything else: a detuned stack of sawtooth waves, and a wide chorus over the top. Get those right and the rest is detail.

This page is a complete build. Choose New, in the Menu button in the top left corner, to clear the patch back to a single unshaped oscillator, then work down the sections in order: the raw tone, then its shape, then movement, then the effects that finish it. You do not need to have built anything else first.

What you get is a chord instrument. Push it further in one direction and it stops being retro wave and becomes something the instrument guides cover in more depth: Pad once the chords are held long enough to evolve, Lead once a single line plays over the top, and Bass for the driving octave bassline underneath, which is a separate patch. Their tables are not this one's, and they are not meant to be: a pad's envelope is measured in seconds, where a stab lives in tenths. Follow the page whose sound you are actually building.

Each control below gets a start value and a range to try, and each entry says what happens when you cross an edge. The ranges come from what the style is, not from a survey of our presets. See how to read these tables for what the provenance tags mean.

Voice

• Voice Mode (production convention). The style is played as chords and stabs, so Poly. Switch to Mono for the driving octave bassline that runs under them, which is one line and wants to be one voice.

Oscillator

SuperSaw is the direct route: selecting it loads a ready-made stack of detuned sawtooth copies. In that mode the oscillator builds its own saws and never reads a wavetable, so the wavetable card and the two Warp rows below are unavailable. Those two rows are the alternate route, and taking them means switching to Wavetable first.

• Osc1 Mode (production convention). SuperSaw loads a ready-made stack of detuned sawtooth copies, which is the raw material of the style. Wavetable with a saw table and the PWM warp gives the hollow pulse tone of the era's cheaper synths instead.
• Osc1 Unison (production convention). Enough copies to read as an ensemble. Fewer than a trance stack, because here the width comes from the chorus rather than from the number of saws, and a chord has to stay readable as a chord.
• Osc1 Detune (production convention). Deliberately less than a trance supersaw. Retro wave is played as chords, and a stack detuned past about 30 ct smears the individual notes of a triad into one another, so the chord stops reading as a chord.
• Osc1 Curve (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Kiwisynth-only. Under 50% the copies cluster toward the centre, which leaves a firm fundamental under the chord.
• Osc1 Width (production convention). Wide. A chord carries no low end that would collapse when a club system sums to mono, so it is one of the sounds that can take nearly full width. Keep the bassline narrower than this.
• Warmth (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Kiwisynth-only pre-filter saturation. It rounds the top of the saw stack before the filter, which is a good part of what the ear reads as an analog machine rather than a digital one.
• Osc1 Warp (production convention). Off for the saw stack this build starts from. PWM is the alternative route and gives the hollow pulse tone of the era's cheaper synths, which is the other sound the style is remembered for. It needs Osc1 Mode set to Wavetable with a saw table loaded, because the warp shapes a table rather than the SuperSaw engine.
• Osc1 Warp Amt, when Osc1 Warp is PWM (production convention). How far from a square the pulse is pushed, and only meaningful with the row above set to PWM. The value matters less than the fact that it moves: route a slow LFO here for the breathing character that makes a pulse-width sound, because a static pulse width is just a thinner waveform. At the extremes the pulse narrows to a buzz with very little fundamental left.

Filter

• Filter Type (production convention). A ladder filter. Its warmth is the analog character the era was built on.
• Filter Cutoff, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (production convention). Not parked wide open. The brightness of a stab comes from the envelope opening the filter and letting it settle back, not from a high resting cutoff. Past about 5000 Hz there is little left for the envelope to open, and the swell stops being audible.
• Filter Reso, when Filter Type is LP12, LP24 or MGLow24 (production convention). A little peak sharpens the front of each stab. Far lower than a trance supersaw asks for, and the reason is the chord: a resonant peak sits at one frequency while a triad has three, so the peak reinforces whichever note happens to be nearest and quietly unbalances the harmony. Past about 35% it sings over the chord, and what you hear is the filter rather than the triad.
• Filt Env (acoustic fact). The control that most says brass rather than plain saw. It opens the cutoff at the start of the note and lets it settle, which is the swell a brass section makes as the players lean into a stab.

Amp envelope

• Attack (acoustic fact). A medium attack is what separates a brass patch from a synth patch: a brass section takes a moment to speak. One of the few places where the fastest attack is the wrong answer.
• Decay (production convention). With the sustain high, the decay only shapes the settle after the swell rather than the length of the note.
• Sustain (production convention). Held chords stay at strength.
• Release (production convention). The chord rings a short way into the chorus and the reverb. Past about 0.6 s a stab is still sounding when the next one lands, and a stab that overlaps the next one is no longer a stab.

For a plucked bass or a short stab instead, use the fastest Attack with a short Decay and a low Sustain, so each note is tight and separate.

Movement

The driving arpeggio is the other signature of the style. The first row below is the on switch, and the three after it shape the climbing line that runs under so many tracks of the era.

• Arp On/Off (production convention). The switch every other row in this section depends on. The arpeggiator is off in a blank patch, so the pattern, rate and octave span below do nothing until this is on, and the driving line that is half of what makes the style recognisable never appears.
• Arp Pattern (production convention). The line climbs. UpDown folds it back down again, which suits a slower passage where a rising line would be relentless.
• Arp Rate (production convention). The sixteenth-note line that runs under so many tracks of the era. An eighth gives the same figure a slower, heavier walk.
• Arp Octaves (production convention). The line has to travel, or it is a repeated chord rather than an arpeggio. Past three octaves it leaves the register the chords live in and starts sounding like a separate instrument.
• Arp Chance (Kiwisynth-specific, our judgment). Kiwisynth-only, and the original hardware had nothing like it. At 100% the line is machine-exact, which is period-correct and turns into wallpaper over a long section. Dropping the occasional step at random keeps it alive while the groove stays locked.

Chance and Ratchet are controls the original hardware did not have. Chance is in the table above. Ratchet retriggers a step several times, which is a modern gesture rather than a period one, so use it sparingly if you want the patch to stay in the era.

Effects

• Chorus Mode (production convention). Ensemble runs several modulated voices rather than one. That is the difference between an ordinary chorus and the lush wash the era is remembered for.
• Chorus Mix (production convention). The signature of the whole style, and higher than anywhere else: about 50%, against roughly 30% on a lead. It is what turns a plain saw stack into the sound of the era.
• Reverb Size (production convention). A large room. The gate below only reads as the trademark effect if there is a big tail for it to cut off.
• Reverb Mix (production convention). Enough to place the chord in a room. Less than it feels like it should be, because the chorus is already doing the widening.
• Reverb Gate (production convention). The other trademark. Turned up it cuts the tail the moment each hit stops, so a stab gets a burst of space instead of a wash. It is only dramatic with a large size behind it, and it belongs on stabs, not on held chords.
• Tape Wow (production convention). The pitch warble of old machines. Past about 25% it stops reading as a period recording and starts reading as a broken tape.