Synthwave: a pumping arp bass, a gated snare, neon pads and an arpeggio hook

Take the loop apart

Press Play and let the eight bars loop a few times. The first four rows are the tracks of an Ensemble Set: Drums on T1, Arp bass on T2, Pad on T3 and Arp hook on T4. The fifth row, Gated snare, is a track of its own after the set. Every part is original MIDI written for this lesson, and every sound plays live in your browser from devices you can edit.

The sections below build the loop up one layer at a time. Use Solo and Mute in the player as you read. Edit sound opens a part’s editor on this page.

1. The motor and the pump

Solo Drums, then add Arp bass. The kick plays every beat. The closed hi-hat is loud on each off-beat 8th and soft on the 16ths around it, and a clap marks 2 and 4. The bass never stops: on every beat it plays the chord’s root, the root again, the root an octave up, then the root, in 16th notes.

Listen to the bass breathe. A Compressor after it listens to the kick on T1 and turns the bass down for a moment on every beat, so it swells back between kicks: that “pump” is part of the sound. The pad ducks the same way, a little less. In bar 8 four toms fall from high to low on beat 4 and lead back to bar 1.

2. The gated snare

Add Gated snare. On 2 and 4 a synth snare hits a large reverb, and a Gate after the reverb shuts the sound about a fifth of a second later: an enormous burst, then silence. This is the 1980s drum sound that synthwave rebuilt.

The snare has its own track because the Ensemble Set’s reverb is shared by every part, and a gate on it would cut the pad’s and the hook’s tails too. Open the track’s devices and switch the Gate off: the snare becomes a long, washy hall. Switch it back on and the tail stops dead.

3. Minor, but heroic

The key is E minor, one chord per bar:

• Bars 1–4: i – VImaj7 – VII – v7 (Em(add9) – Cmaj7 – D(add9) – Bm7)
• Bars 5–8: i9 – VImaj9 – iv9 – VIIsus4 VII (Em9 – Cmaj9 – Am9 – Dsus4, then D)

i – VI – VII climbs back toward the tonic, and the added 9ths and major 7ths make the minor chords glow instead of sounding sad. Solo Pad: the voicings stay close together and move as little as possible, and only the pad’s filter breathes, never its pitch.

4. The arpeggio is the hook

Add Arp hook. There is no singer: the tune is a 16th-note arpeggio through each chord, ten notes a bar, with six 16ths left empty. The set’s delay repeats each note a dotted 8th later, three 16ths, so the echoes land among the notes: some fill the gaps, others double the next notes.

Solo Arp hook and listen to the notes and the echoes weave together. Without the echo the rhythm sounds broken; with it the line rolls. Many synthwave hooks are built exactly like this, a short figure and its delay.

5. Not synth-pop

Compare this loop with the Synth-pop lesson. Synth-pop is 1980s song music: its bass bounces in 8th-note octaves and a singable lead carries a verse and a chorus. Here the bass is a 16th-note sequence, everything pumps against the kick, the snare is huge and gated, and the music is a soundtrack rather than a song.

6. The sounds

Each Ensemble part starts from a factory sound, with a few settings changed for this arrangement. Edit sound shows every value, and the same project opens in the DAW. A value written as 40/127 is the knob’s stored number on a 0–127 scale; the editor’s display may show it converted, for example as a percentage or a time.

Drums (T1): the Drum engine, KIT 77

DRUM KIT on the Drum engine with KIT set to 77: a long kick, a snare over broad noise, tight multi-burst claps and toms that bend down. TUNE 62/127, TONE 70/127, DECY 60/127, SNAP 64/127, ACC 100/127, KICK PUNCH, DRV 12/127. Notes follow the General MIDI drum map: 36 kick, 39 clap, 42 closed hi-hat, 50, 48, 45 and 43 the toms.

Arp bass (T2): Trio, FAT BASS

FAT BASS on the Trio engine plays three saws, the third an octave below, so every note already has its sub. CUT goes from 62/127 to 56/127 and RES from 45/127 to 40/127; the envelope is tighter (DEC 45/127, SUS 50/127, REL 15/127) and the filter envelope opens each note. VCE is MONO with no glide. After it, a Compressor keyed by T1 (sidechain EQ: low-pass at 100 Hz, so only the kick counts), ratio 4:1, attack 1 ms, release 120 ms.

Pad (T3): Duo, STRINGS

STRINGS on the Duo engine: two saws with a slow attack and a long release. DTN drops from 25/127 to 14/127 and MIX from 64/127 to 48/127, because Duo detunes the second saw upward only and a big detune pulls the chord sharp; the set’s chorus gives the width instead. CUT 64/127, and a triangle LFO at RATE 40/127 (about 0.4 Hz) moves the filter only. After it, a Compressor keyed by T1 at 3:1 and an EQ Eight high-pass at 220 Hz.

Arp hook (T4): Duo, PLUCK

PLUCK on the Duo engine: a saw with no sustain, so each note is a short blip, and a strong filter envelope (FLT +50) that gives it its snap. DTN 6/127, MIX 40/127, CUT 34/127, RES 40/127, DEC 70/127, REL 40/127. DLY is turned up to 55/127, the most of any part, because the echo is half the hook.

Gated snare (track 5): Drift, Reverb, Gate

Drift plays the snare: a triangle body (the note A3, about 220 Hz) under white noise, both gone in about 180 ms, with a quick downward pitch blip. A Reverb (1.5 s, half wet) makes it huge, and a Gate shuts it: threshold −14 dB, return 1 dB, attack 0.1 ms, hold 150 ms, release 40 ms, floor −70 dB. Raise the threshold for a shorter burst; lower it and the tail rings on.

The set’s shared effects

The Ensemble parts share the set’s Chorus, Delay and Reverb returns. The chorus is slow and deep (RATE 30/127, DEPTH 75/127) and widens the pad. The delay is set to a dotted 8th (TIME 1/8D, FEEDBACK 50/127, COLOR 75/127, MIX 90/127) for the hook. The reverb is a HALL (SIZE 100/127, DAMP 50/127). On the master, LOWCUT stays OFF and MASTER is lowered to 104/127 to leave headroom.

7. More examples

The list under the player holds eleven more examples. Six are variations: outrun, dreamwave, darksynth, a film-score ostinato, pop-wave with saxophone and the Italo-disco roots of the sound. Each has its own tempo, key, chords and sounds, and each one opens in the DAW with its own featured part.

Five are reference studies: short sections of well-known records, rebuilt with TuttiDAW instruments from public transcriptions so you can solo each part: the melody, the chords, the groove, the bass line, the texture and the sound. The vocal lines are sung by the Voice engine. Each one names the record it studies. Listen to the original next to the study and compare.

Try this in the DAW

Open in the DAW loads this exact project into the browser studio. The Arp hook track is selected and armed, and its Ensemble editor is open: play the on-screen keys or your computer keyboard and hear how the delay answers every note. Then try these changes:

1. Half-time dream: move the gated snare to beat 3 only, delete the kicks on beats 2 and 4 in T1’s clip, and set the tempo to 84 BPM. The same chords turn into dreamwave.
2. Darker: set T2’s CUT to 40/127 and RES to 70/127 and turn up its DST, then turn bar 6 into F major, the Phrygian flat II of E minor. Pad: F3, A3, C4, F4. Bass (T2, bar 6 only): every C2 becomes F2 and every C3 becomes F3. Arp (T4, bar 6 only): E4 → F4, D5 → F5, G4 → A4 (the C5s stay). The track turns darksynth.
3. Bass gallop: in T2’s clip keep only the notes on each beat and on its last two 16ths (positions 0, 0.5 and 0.75 of every beat). The bass gallops like an outrun car chase.

Your edits stay in that temporary project. They do not change this page.