The Midnight " Los Angeles" Breakdown
The Midnight is one of the most popular artists of Synthwave and their song "Los Angeles" has to be one of their most emblematic, from their album "Days of Thunder" this song combines dream-pop with classic 80s sounds making it perfect for all Synthwave lovers out there, so in this tutorial we are going to teach you how to make this track to perfection, so let's give it a listen.
Before we forget a quick reminder that all the presets in this tutorial are in our Outrun Premium Pack and all of our Synthwave/Outrun/Retrowave related products have 20% off with the code: SW01
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Let's start this breakdown with the first thing you hear as soon as the song starts which is the arp, this is the main element of the track because it plays throughout the song, as always we will use Serum to recreate this patch, so from the default settings, activate the oscillators and choose Basic Shapes in both of them, put the wavetable in its second position and give each oscillator 4 voices and detune them a little, now in the oscillator "B" give it just a little bit of FM coming for oscillator "A".
So now that we are done with the oscillators it's time to play with the envelopes, in envelope 1 set the attack at 5 ms, the decay around 1.5 s, the sustain at -9dB and the release at 1.1 s now route it to the cutoff of the filter which is around 6 Khz, by the way the filter we choose is the German LP and it has a little bit of resonance.
Also after I was done with my Serum patch I added Vinyl distortion with the effect from Ableton.
This Bass couldn't be more classic from the genre, often called running basses, with this patch we started in oscillator "A" with an MB saw waveform with 3 voices and slightly detune, in oscillator "B" we have a Basic Shape and we put the wavetable in its fourth position and this one only has 2 voices, but the most important part of this patch its to make it plucky and to do that we have to use the envelopes.
We need the envelope 1 to have an attack time of 1ms, a decay time of 500 ms and a release time of 300 ms, now we need to route this envelope to the filter around 4 Khz.
For the final part of the breakdown, we have the chords, so start we need to start we the default settings which are two sawtooth waves with 4 voices each, detune them a little with an LFO now add the sub-oscillator with a square wave, now for the important part of this patch, we start tweaking with the envelopes.
In envelope 1 we set the attack at .3 ms, the decay at 2.47 s, the sustain at 3.4 dB and the release at 2.05s, now route it to the cutoff of the filter and the level of each oscillator and that's it.
