The Weeknd "Save Your Tears" Serum Tutorial & Breakdown

The Weeknd has surprised us again with a new synthpop anthem. His album "After Hours" is in our top 5 albums of 2020, and "Save Your Tears" was always our favorite song on it, so we were eagerly waiting for the single to make this tutorial. Below we recreate every instrument using only Serum, with audio and settings for each. Let's give it a listen.

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RELATED BREAKDOWNS

• The Weeknd "Take My Breath" Breakdown
• The Weeknd "In Your Eyes" Breakdown
• The Weeknd "Blinding Lights" Breakdown

The Bass

Unlike the bass in his songs "In Your Eyes" and "Blinding Lights", this is not a synthesized bass, so we will try to recreate it as similar as possible with Serum. We start with an MB Saw waveform on oscillator "A" slightly detuned and on oscillator "B" we use the waveform FFT_Add_2nds with one voice and its WT position at number fifteen, also the sub-oscillator has a Saw wave with one octave down. Envelope one is controlling the filter cutoff, and LFO 1 is being routed to the amp in the global tab in the matrix working as a sidechain and ducking the sound every quarter note.

The Pad

This pad is the melody of the song and I think he did a magnificent job as it complements the bass in a very harmonic way. To start we need a basic shape in the oscillator "A" in its waveform number two and in the oscillator "B" we use the same basic shape in its waveform number three both oscillators have twelve voices to make it sound extra big and lush. Envelope 1 has an attack of 350 ms so it opens a little slowly and a decay of 640 ms so it fades naturally, one of the most important parts of the sound design of this pad is that LFO 3 is modulating the detune of both oscillators and for the final touch in our FX tab we drenched the sound with reverb.

The Keys

To be honest these keys didn't need much sound design. Oscillator "A" is using a Saw wave wavetable with seven voices and Oscillator "B" is using a Basic Mg wavetable at position thirty and has 4 voices, the important part is that envelope 2 is modulating the filter cutoff making it sound a little plucky also we have a ping pong delay set pretty hard in the FX tab and a little bit of detuning coming from LFO 1.

The Bells

In the fourth and eighth bar of each chorus he uses this 80s kind of bell to fill the space he is not singing anymore and this sound is so reminiscent of Synthwave and Synthpop it just gives the whole song an aesthetic cohesion. In oscillator "A" we use a saw wave with the sync mode at 1.4%; in oscillator "B" we use a PWM Weird wavetable with its wavetable position at 256, this oscillator is going to give the sound a lot of shimmer. Drench it in reverb and delay and you've got it.

The Arp

In the last verse of the song The Weeknd changes the pad for an arp, and for me this little change in the arrangement is just magic; it makes it sound more vibrant. To do this we need a Hypa wavetable in oscillator "A" and a square wavetable in oscillator "B", what makes this sound so distinctive is that the decay of envelope 1 is at 430 ms making this sound shorter and perfect to be arpeggiated, this envelope is also modulating the filter cutoff around 2 kHz.

Make your own Save Your Tears-style track.

You've heard how the bass, pad, keys, bells and arp are built. The Synthpop Pack has sounds like these ready to load in Serum.

Want the whole palette? The Special Synthwave Bundle includes the Synthpop Pack plus nine more retro packs (Synthwave, Outrun, Retrowave, Darksynth and more) for $49.90.