Washed Out "Feel It All Around" Breakdown: Synths in Serum

As you may have noticed, we're obsessed with everything about the 80s, from the sound to the aesthetics, so it's no surprise that we spend much of our day listening to chillwave. The genre became known in the late 2000s, and it's largely based on sampling 80s music and slowing down its tempo and pitch. That's the case with Washed Out's "Feel It All Around": it samples Gary Low's "I Want You", slowing it from 122 BPM to 86 BPM and dropping it six semitones. Instead of doing that, we remade the song from scratch without any samples, so let's give it a listen.

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RELATED BREAKDOWNS

- Home "Resonance" Breakdown

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The Bass

Like in many songs of this style, the bass is the driving force here. To make this patch we used 2 Basic Shapes. In OSC A we put the wavetable position at 2 and bend it at -70%. In OSC B the wavetable is set at position 4, which makes it a square wave, and the sub-oscillator has a sine wave. Envelope 1 is modulating the filter cutoff with a decay of 650 ms, and that's it.

The Chords

Something tells us the chords were made with a digital synthesizer. It couldn't have been the famous DX7, since it came out in 1983 and Gary Low's song came out in 1982, so it must have been the Yamaha GS-1 or the Fairlight CMI. Why am I telling you this? Because these chords were a little tricky, so we used a production trick called layering: to create one specific sound, you stack several layers of the same harmony or melody. Our layers are made with Serum's digital wavetables instead of the analog ones. But enough of the lecture: let's hear layer one.

Layer 1

Our first layer has a saw wave in OSC A with a sync window around 1.5%, and OSC B has a Prime wavetable. This preset's characteristic sound comes from its Cmb L6- filter, whose resonance and mix knobs are modulated by 2 LFOs. The fine-tuning on both oscillators is modulated too.

Layer 2

For layer two we used a Prime wavetable for OSC A and modulated its wavetable position with an LFO. For OSC B we chose a PWM C64 wavetable and also modulated its wavetable position with an LFO. Both are routed to the filter, a Cmb H6+, whose cutoff is modulated by envelope 1.

The Arp

For the sound design of this arp we also used 2 layers to get the sound we wanted. The first layer is the most prominent, and the second layer sits several decibels lower, but it adds a touch of sparkle in the high end.

Layer 1

This preset is quite simple. In OSC A we use a saw wave with FM from oscillator B; in OSC B we have a Basic Shape wavetable in its second position with Bend+ at 100%. The important part of this plucky sound is in the envelopes: the decay needs to be short, so here it's around 415 ms, but the release is longer at 1.55 s, so the sound lasts longer with a big shimmering delay.

Layer 2

The second layer is also very straightforward. OSC A has a Basic Mini waveform in its third position, and OSC B has a Basic Shape waveform in its third position as well. What gives this preset its characteristic sound is the ring modulation filter, which makes it sound more vibrant and airy.

The Guitar: Using Serum as a Sampler

Did you know that you can use Serum as a sampler? If you didn't, you're about to find out. We wanted to create every part of this breakdown in Serum, but when we got to the guitar we hit a wall, and there was only one way through it: record a sustained note on our Telecaster and sample it in Serum. That's what we did.

First, we grabbed our Telecaster one-shot (remember, it must be tuned to C) and dragged it to the wavetable window. Once in there, we chose the Constant Framesize option. Next, we automated the wavetable position, which we did with LFO 1. After that, we used Ableton's stock Amp to give it a little distortion, and that's it.

If you liked this breakdown, check out our breakdown of the track "Resonance" by Home.

Make your own Feel It All Around-style track.

You've heard how the bass, the layered chords and the shimmering arp are built. The Chillwave Pack has them ready to load in Serum, along with the rest of its 125+ presets. Use code VW01 at checkout for 20% off.

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