Wallows "Are You Bored Yet" Breakdown
Wallows released their album Nothing Happens in March of 2019 and the first single of the album is Are You Bored Yet? becoming their most popular song even to this day, this track even charted on billboard and went platinum, the band is composed of Braeden Lemasters, Cole Preston, and Dylan Minnette which you probably know from the series "13 Reasons Why", this song was also written by Clairo one of the most popular artists when it comes to the Bedroom Pop and Dreampop genres, In this tutorial, I’ll show you all the sound design behind the synths of the track, let's get started.
This article was possible because all of the presets from this breakdown came from our Bedroom Pop Serum pack and it has have 20% off with the code: BP01.
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Let's start as always, with the bass, this organic sounding bassline runs through a little distortion making it sound similar to electric bass, to start this patch we need a Jno wavetable in oscillator "A" with a sync at around 20% in oscillator "B" we have a Analog_Bd_sin with some FM modulation coming from oscillator "A", our envelope 2 is modulating the cutoff which is cutting everything above 300 Hz, now to get some extra harmonics in the FX tab we use the distortion in HardClip at around 60%.
If you ask us the most emblematic part of the song has to be this melody, once the first note hits your ear you already know you are about to hear an amazing song, and funny enough this patch isn't that complicated showing that not everything has to be that hard to make to be brilliant, to make this preset we need an acid wavetable in oscillator "A" with the sync at 2.5% and the wavetable position at around 200, the oscillator "B" has a Sine wave with FM modulation coming from oscillator "A", now to make this patch plucky we need envelope 2 to have a fast decay and to be routed to the cutoff of the filter and that's it.
To create this patch you will need an Analaog_Bd_Sin with sync at around 2%, in oscillator "B" we use an FM_Splat the wavetable position is around 120, envelope 1 has an attack of .5 ms and a decay of 1.34 s with a small release of 630 ms, this envelope is modulating the cutoff of the filter.
This patch is making the same melody as the vocals in the chorus, and its a great way to add an extra layer, to make these bells to sound shiny we used a Ring wavetable in oscillator "A" the wavetable position should be at 150 and in oscillator "B" we are using an ICanHasKick with the wavetable position at max, both oscillators are going through the filter "Reverb" with the Filter KeyTrack on.
Now for the final part the string pad at the end of the chorus, For this sound, I started with an ICanHasKick in oscillator "A" with the wavetable position at around 100, in oscillator a "B" a basic shape in its second wavetable position and also is being bent by our LFO 2, now to get that sweeping effect envelope 3 is modulating the filter opening it slowly so higher harmonics comes through, also we used use tons of reverb and chorus effect to get that washed out sound.
