I can't believe we're again doing another The Weeknd tutorial but every time he releases a new single we find it irresistible to recreate all those synth sounds so this time was the turn of Is There Someone Else? and like always the song is just a Synthpop masterpiece, this track has a few production tips that will be great for you next track like the use of sidechain throughout the song, so lets dive in.
This article was possible because all of the presets from this breakdown came from our Synthpop Serum pack and it has have 20% off with the code: SP01.
As always let's start we the instruments that are the main driving force of the track and in this case, is the bass, so to make this patch you need oscillator "A" an ICanHasKick waveform at position 55 whereas oscillator "B" uses a Basic Shape waveform on its second position and with one voice, envelope 1 has a short decay at around 600 ms to have that pluck sound and is routed to the filter cutoff
Now the important part of this preset is that LFO 1 is modulating the Amp and to do this you first need to draw a sidechain curve in the LFO, then you go to your Matrix and in source you put LFO1 and then in destination, you will find Amp in the global tab and that's it.
To make this chords we use a IHasCanKick wavetable in oscillator "A" and a basic shape waveform in its seventh position in oscillator "B" and it also contains some sync modulation, envelope 1 has an attack at around 40ms and envelope 2 is modulating the cutoff of the filter, this sound is also being sidechained the same way as the bass sound using LFO1 to modulate the amp.
For this patch, we recreated a Rhodes sound, and to achieve this we need a basic shape in its first position in oscillator "A" and in oscillator "B" an Analog_BD_Sin waveform, both oscillators have 7 voices and the amp is being modulated by LFO 1 at a rate of 4.7Hz, now, envelope 2 is modulating the filter cutoff closing it at around 2.10 s
This Arp enters at the 9nth bar of the song adding a new element to the track, adding a little bit of contrast to the other elements, this was my favorite patch to recreate, so for this presets we used an Harmonic Morph in oscillator "A" and an Analog_BD_Sin in oscillator "B" both oscillators have 6 voices and the filter is cutting everything above 7kHz now envelope 1 is whats giving this presets its characteristic plucky sound to do this you just need to set up the decay at a short time at around 200ms.
This synth sound enters in the chorus, and the chord progression is the same one as in the verses so it just adds another layer, to achieve this sound we need a SawRounded in oscillator "A" the wavetable it's in its last position, in oscillator "B" we have an ICanHasKick with only one voice, now set and envelope 1 with an attack at around 70 ms routed to filter cutoff and use and LFO to sidechain the amp like in the other presets and that's it.
