The Weeknd "Take My Breath" Breakdown: Synths in Serum

As you may have noticed, we're massive fans of The Weeknd: there's no song he releases that we won't consider making a tutorial of. "Take My Breath" was the lead single from his fifth studio album, Dawn FM (2022), and its sleek disco-pop groove was too good to pass up. So we made a Serum tutorial on how to make every sound in "Take My Breath", including the guitar. Let's give it a listen.

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RELATED BREAKDOWNS

- The Weeknd "Save Your Tears" Breakdown

- The Weeknd "In Your Eyes" Breakdown

- The Weeknd "Blinding Lights" Breakdown

The Bass

To make this bass we use a Basic Mini waveform on oscillator "A", with 5 voices and frequency modulation coming from oscillator "B". Oscillator "B" uses the ICanHasKick waveform in its position 215. Both oscillators are routed to a Low 18 filter with high resonance, and the cutoff is modulated by envelope 2.

The Guitar: Using Serum as a Sampler

Now for the hardest part: the guitar preset. If you're not familiar with Serum, it's one of the best synths for creating your own waveforms. All you have to do is import your audio into the oscillators and choose how you want it imported. So that's what I did: I imported a Telecaster one-shot into oscillator "A" and a Stratocaster one-shot into oscillator "B". To give the wavetables movement, we used LFO 1 to modulate their position so it sounds as natural as possible.

Two of the most important things for making this preset sound organic are small variations in the dynamics and in the length of each note. For the first, we routed velocity to the level of each oscillator and to the filter cutoff, and when we wrote the MIDI notes we gave each one a little variation, as you'll see in the image below. To vary the length of the notes, modulate the decay of envelope 1 with an LFO.

The Arp

This sound is quite simple. To start, you need a Jno waveform in oscillator "A" and a Basic Mg waveform in oscillator "B". To make it sound a little dreamy, go to the Effects tab, add Hyper Dimension, Chorus and Reverb, and turn their knobs to around 50% each. For the final touch, add sidechain: either inside Serum or with a plugin like Kickstart.

The Keys (Wurli)

This one sounds like a Wurli. To make it, we need a SawRounded wavetable in oscillator "A" and a Ds Saw and Tri wavetable in oscillator "B". LFO 1 is modulating the Amp in the Global tab, the filter cutoff is closed by envelope 3, and to give the sound a little body we crank up the Drive knob on the filter.

The Bridge Keys with Rising Vibrato

In the bridge, new elements come in. One of them is a keys sound with a vibrato that gradually increases. To make it, first use a PWM_Mdc in oscillator "A" and a saw waveform in oscillator "B". The trick to this vibrato is to use envelope 3 as an Aux Source, so the curve of your envelope decides the speed of the vibrato.

To create the vibrato effect, go to the Matrix tab and choose the envelope you want to use to modulate the speed of the LFO that's moving the fine-tuning of your oscillators.

The Bridge Bass

For the final part, we'll recreate the bass in the bridge. Start by choosing a Basic Shape in its second position in oscillator "A", with the sync around 1.3%, and in oscillator "B" use a Jno wavetable in its third position. To make it sound a little reesy, we use an envelope to close the filter cutoff and add a little resonance. Then add a little distortion and Hyper Dimension in the FX tab, and that's it.

If you liked this breakdown, read our tutorials on Blinding Lights, Save Your Tears and In Your Eyes.

Make your own Take My Breath-style track.

You've heard how the bass, the sampled guitar and the Wurli keys are built. The Dreampop Pack has sounds like these ready to load in Serum: hazy guitars, dreamy keys, ethereal pads and more.

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