Future Islands "Seasons" Breakdown

One of our biggest influences has always been Future Islands, ever since we heard the song Walking through that door from the Evening air album we were hooked, the slightly out of tune synths, the amazing bass lines, and the mix between organic and electronic sounds blew us away, not to mention the striking and particular voice of vocalist Samuel T. Herring who is the cherry on top that gives the finishing touches to this brilliant project, their most popular song is obviously Seasons, so we took on the task of redoing it using Serum, so let's listen to it.

Also this article was possible because all of the presets from this breakdown came from our Dreamwave Serum pack which has 20% off with the code SP01

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The melody of this synth as simple as it is will get stuck in your head for days making it impossible to forget in the years to come, so to make this sound we used a Basic Mini in oscillator "A" in its fourth wavetable position, oscillator "B" has a Saw wave with one octave lower to give the sound more body and presence, now the important part of the preset is the filter, we used an MG Low 24 being modulated with our envelope 2, now the characteristic part of the sound comes from the resonance in the filter which is around 45%.

Using the same melody as the main synth this layer gives a sensation of movement to the sound, as each oscillator has 8 voices, and being detuned by the LFO 2, making it sound a little ethereal, to achieve this, we used an Analog_Bd_Sin in oscillator "A" the wavetable is being modulated by LFO 1 and in oscillator "B" we have a Basic Shapes in its second position, the filter is cutting everything above 4 kHz and in the FX Tab, we have our chorus and hyper dimension effects around 50% to make it sound wider.

This is your classic rolling bass sound, and to create this sound we need Basic Mini in oscillator "A" in its fourth position, and in oscillator "B" we need the same but we are going to bend it to give it a little more treble and turn an octave down, now to make this plucky bass we need to modulate the filter cutoff with our envelope 1 which has a 650 ms decay, also turn the drive in the filter up to give more body to the sound.

Our favorite part to recreate was the lead, It has so many small details that made it a challenge to remake it, but I think we can confidently say that it is almost identical to the original, first, we start with two square waves oscillator "A" has a pulse width modulation (or PWM) at around 80% and oscillator has it at 30% this makes it sound more high pitch, now to get the vibrato right on point with need and LFO modulation the fine-tuning of the oscillator at around 7 kHz and we cut everything above 4 kHz with a Low 12 filter and that's it.