The Midnight "Los Angeles" Breakdown: Synths in Serum

The Midnight is one of the most popular synthwave acts, and "Los Angeles" has to be one of their most emblematic songs. From their album "Days of Thunder", it combines dream pop with classic 80s sounds, which makes it perfect for all synthwave lovers out there. In this tutorial we're going to show you how to recreate it step by step in Serum, so let's give it a listen.

• Every sound in this breakdown comes from our Outrun Serum Pack. You can now recreate the full track instantly.
  
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The "Los Angeles" Arp in Serum

Let's start with the first thing you hear when the song begins: the arp. It's the main element of the track because it plays all the way through the song. As always, we'll use Serum to recreate this patch. From the default settings, activate the oscillators and choose Basic Shapes in both of them. Put the wavetable in its second position, give each oscillator 4 voices and detune them a little. Then give oscillator "B" just a little bit of FM from oscillator "A".

Now that we're 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 -9 dB and the release at 1.1 s. Now route it to the filter cutoff, which is around 6 kHz. By the way, the filter we chose is the German LP, with a little bit of resonance.

Once my Serum patch was done, I also added some distortion with Ableton's Vinyl Distortion effect.

The Running Bass

This bass couldn't be more classic for the genre: it's what's often called a running bass. For this patch we started in oscillator "A" with an MB Saw waveform with 3 slightly detuned voices. In oscillator "B" we have a Basic Shape with the wavetable in its fourth position, and this one only has 2 voices. But the most important part of this patch is making it plucky, and to do that we use the envelopes.

We need envelope 1 to have an attack time of 1 ms, a decay time of 500 ms and a release time of 300 ms. Now route this envelope to the filter cutoff, set around 4 kHz.

The Chords

For the final part of the breakdown we have the chords. Here we start with the default settings, which are two sawtooth waves with 4 voices each. Detune them a little with an LFO, then add the sub-oscillator with a square wave. Now for the important part of this patch: tweaking 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 2.05 s. Now route it to the filter cutoff and to the level of each oscillator, and that's it.

Make your own Los Angeles-style track.

You've heard how the arp, the bass and the chords are built. The Outrun Pack has them ready to load in Serum, along with the rest of its 125+ presets.

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