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The Weeknd "Blinding Light" Breakdown

We all know that The Weeknd went full synthwave with his track Blinding Lights and to be honest we are all loving it, We think here at Synth Ctrl this is a great example on how to mix two worlds together so we wanted to make an article on how to achieve that sound with the main synth we use which is Serum, so as always let's give it a listen.

This article was possible because all of the presets from this breakdown came from our Synthwave Serum Pack  and all of our Synthwave/Outrun/Retrowave related products have 20% off with the code: SW01 

RELATED BREAKDOWNS

- The Weeknd "Save Your Tears" Breakdown

- The Weeknd "In Your Eyes" Breakdown

The Weeknd "Take My Breath" Breakdown

 

So let's start by the most captivating part of the track which is the melody, to make this sound we use a saw wave in oscillator "A", a jno wavetable for oscillator "B", both oscillators have 4 voices each and are slightly detuned and for the sub-oscillator, we choose a squarewave, the interesting part of this patch is that envelope 2 which has an attack time of 2ms, a decay time of 1.2s, a sustain of 40% and a release of 450ms is routed to the cutoff of the filter but also to the level of both oscillators, after that we drenched the sound with reverb and delay.

Now for the bass, we used a sine wave in oscillator "A", in oscillator "B" we used a basic mini wavetable and in the sub-oscillator a saw wave, our LFO 1 is modulating our finetuning in both oscillators at a rate of 1.6Hz and our envelope 3 is modulating the cutoff and the resonance of the filter and the detuning in oscillator "A", for me the most important part of the bass it was the legato between the notes especially in the transitions, so remember to add legato and portamento to the patch.

For the last part, our pad is playing the chord progression, in this patch, we used a jno wavetable for oscillator "A" and a basic_mdg for oscillator "B" which both are being modulated by our envelope 1 which has an attack time of 50 ms, a decay time of 1.29s, -8.6dB of sustain and 602ms of release time, this envelope is being routed to level and bend of our oscillators and also the resonance of the filter and the level of our noise, also LFO 1 is modulating the detuning of our oscillators at a rate of 2.0Hz.

Check out our other The Weeknd Breakdown tutorials on the tracks "Save Your Tears" and "In Your Eyes"