How synthwave is made: the sounds, the gear, the tricks

Synthwave is built from five parts: programmed drums with a short, hard-cut reverb, a steady synth bass, repeating arpeggios, wide pads with a lead on top, and a lot of shared space from reverb, delay and chorus. That breakdown is ours, not a standard, but it covers most of what you hear on the records. None of it needs a room full of vintage hardware today: the Frekvenci archive lists 8,105 synthwave releases, and 1,939 of them are self-released.

Below, the parts come in the order you would build a track, each tied to a real machine or technique from the 1980s that producers still imitate. The gear facts come from manufacturer, studio-magazine and interview sources, and a table near the end pairs each machine with the sound it gave. This is a listener's guide to production, not a shopping list.

The five parts in one pass

1. Drums. A drum machine, or drums made to sound like one, with a short reverb that stops abruptly on the snare.
2. Bass. A plain synth line in even notes, locked to the kick.
3. Arpeggios. A chord played one note at a time, fast and repeating.
4. Pads and leads. Warm chords underneath, a brighter melody above.
5. Space. Reverb, delay and chorus that place everything in one imagined room.

Once you can hear these five, you can take a track apart. What remains is arrangement: when the drums enter, when the lead drops out, how long the breakdown runs.

Where the drum sound comes from

The snare people associate with the decade is a big reverb that is cut off instead of fading. That is gated reverb: a noise gate chops the tail of a strong reverb so the hit stays loud and tight, with no long wash behind it.^[3] It was popularised around 1980. Accounts credit studio work in London, where engineer Hugh Padgham and Phil Collins recorded Peter Gabriel's third album, and Steve Lillywhite, who has said he tried an earlier version on Siouxsie and the Banshees' 1978 album The Scream. A gated snare also turns up on a Yellow Magic Orchestra track from 1978.^[3] There is no single inventor, which is why we avoid naming one.

The drum machine matters as much as the reverb. Sound On Sound's history of a-ha's "Take On Me" says Pål Waaktaar programmed the drums on a LinnDrum, and that the engineer compressed its stock snare hard to make it tight and slappy.^[2] The article doesn't mention gated reverb. That's worth remembering: "1980s drums" in synthwave is a composite of habits, not a record of what one studio did.

Roland's TR-808, introduced in 1980, took another route. Because memory for recorded drum sounds was expensive, its engineers built the sounds with analogue circuits, and about 12,000 units were made.^[10] It is a reference point for programmed drums of the period rather than the sound of any synthwave record in particular. Modern producers use sampled or emulated machines, then add a gated-style reverb as a plugin.

Bass and arpeggios

The bass is the engine and the arpeggio is the motion on top of it. The bass sits under the whole track in steady notes, with the kick in the gaps. The arpeggio repeats the notes of a chord one after another. Roland's page on the Juno-106 (1984) is a useful reminder of how much the player did: the earlier Junos had an arpeggiator, and Roland says it was removed on the 106 and replaced by portamento.^[1] On that machine you played or sequenced the pattern yourself, and today's producers do the same with software sequencers.

A practical rule for your own tracks: let the bass and the arpeggio share a key and a rhythm, then change one thing at a time. In a four-minute track, one new chord counts as an event.

Pads, leads and chorus

The Juno-106 also explains the pad sound. Roland lists six voices, six digitally controlled oscillators, a 24 dB-per-octave analogue low-pass filter, a stereo analogue chorus with two depths, 128 stored patches and MIDI.^[1] The chorus is the shimmer people mean when a pad sounds "like the eighties".

Yamaha's DX7, released in 1983, is the other famous machine. It used FM synthesis, which John Chowning discovered at Stanford in the autumn of 1967 and which Stanford licensed to Yamaha around 1974.^[4] The two instruments met on "Take On Me": Sound On Sound reports that a Juno 60 supplied the main riff, a DX7 supplied other material, and a PPG Wave was played in the control room.^[2] A common synthwave arrangement keeps that split: a warm Juno-style pad underneath and a brighter, more digital voice above.

Gear and the sound it gave

Reverb and delay: where the room comes from

The room in a synthwave mix is mostly built from two effects. Sound On Sound's account of "Take On Me" lists the units on one of its mixes: a Lexicon 224X and an AMS RMX16 for reverb, and an RMX15 for a stereo delay, with an AMS delay also used to sample snare hits and layer them over the LinnDrum.^[2] You don't need those boxes. The point is the division of labour: a long, wide reverb for the pads and vocals, a delay that repeats a lead or a high line, and a shorter, harder reverb on the drums. If everything shares the same reverb time, the track sounds like one place; if each part gets its own, it sounds like a collage.

Mixing for the decade, not for a room

Two habits do much of the work. The first is to glue the drums and bass: Sound On Sound explains that a compressor's sidechain is the circuit that decides how much gain reduction to apply, and that in a bass-heavy mix it responds mostly to low-frequency energy, so a kick or a bass note can drive it.^[7] The second is to use one big space: reverb and delay on pads and leads, a shorter reverb on drums, so everything seems to share a room.

An academic study of synthwave soundtracks argues that the sound works as shorthand for "the 1980s", and can feel more 1980s than the decade did.^[9] That's a useful rule for a producer. You aren't copying a studio; you are suggesting one.

How the genre's sound shifts

The same parts get weighted differently across the family. The archive lists 1,803 darksynth releases and 833 dreamwave ones. For the darker end, see What is darksynth? The heavy, horror-lit side of synthwave; for softer, hazier records, Dreamwave: synthwave's soft, nostalgic side. The road-music side is in Outrun music: the racing-game sound of synthwave and Retrowave: the name, the sound and where it overlaps synthwave, and the long synth lines of Spacesynth: the cosmic, Italian-rooted corner of synthwave lean on the arpeggio. Where the drum-machine era began is covered in Italo disco and synthwave: the 1980s sound that keeps coming back, and the song-writing side in Synthpop and synthwave: where the 1980s sound meets the revival.

Composers describe their gear in different ways. Bill Kiley and LudoWic, who scored the game Katana ZERO, name Gary Numan, Yellow Magic Orchestra and Vangelis as listening while they worked, and LudoWic says he used mainly old analogue synths and drum machines and recorded most tracks as jams.^[11] Tom Andersson, who records as Waveshaper, uses hardware including the ARP 2600, Roland Jupiter-4 and Korg MS-20.^[12] Hardware is a choice, not a requirement.

How two producers describe their process

Two interviews give a first-hand view. Timecop1983 (Jordy Leenaerts) says he began with a DOS tracker called Scream Tracker, learned by recreating the songs that came with it, and piled up around 10,000 loops and half-finished pieces before settling on 1980s-style music. For Reflections he starts with a loop of six or seven seconds that holds all the sounds from the middle of the track, then builds the rest around it, and seldom begins with a melody.^[5] Mitch Murder's label, Rosso Corsa, credited his "clean pads, complex bass lines, and clever chord progressions" for catching its attention.^[6] Both are the artists' own accounts, not measurements.

Free tools

You can build every part without original hardware. Surge XT is an open-source software synthesizer with three oscillators per scene and 27 effect algorithms, for Windows, macOS and Linux.^[8] Pair it with a sampler for drum hits and a reverb plugin, and you have the five parts. We don't review plugins or take affiliate links; use whichever you can learn fastest.

The scale of independent making shows in the data. Synthwave in the archive went from 33 releases in 2009 to 963 in 2020. Do it yourself: how much synthwave is self-released? looks at that, and Synthwave for YouTube and Twitch: what you can actually use covers what to do with a finished track.

Hear it in the archive

The archive doesn't tag records by technique, so treat these as starting points, and listen for the parts named above.

1. Dangerous Days

   Perturbator · 2014 · Blood Music · LP

   A heavy 2014 album; useful for practising picking out bass, drums and arpeggio.
2. Reflections

   Timecop1983 · 2015 · TimeSlaves · LP

   The album behind the short-loop method described above.
3. This Is Now

   Mitch Murder · 2011 · The Analogue Quadrant · EP

   A 2011 EP from the producer whose pads and bass lines his label praised.
4. Iteration

   Com Truise · 2017 · Ghostly International · LP

   A 2017 album on Ghostly International; synth-led, to set against the heavier picks.
5. Redline

   Lazerhawk · 2010 · Rosso Corsa Records · LP

   Road-music arpeggios and bass, dated 2010.
6. Nightcall

   Kavinsky · 2010 · Record Makers · EP

   A 2010 EP: slow beat, heavy bass line, vocoded voice.

Questions people ask

Do I need vintage hardware to make synthwave?

No. Free software such as Surge XT covers the synth side, and plenty of producers work entirely in software. Some, like Waveshaper, prefer hardware, but that is taste.

Is gated reverb just a noise gate?

Not quite. A gate is the tool; gated reverb is a strong reverb whose tail the gate cuts off. One way to build it runs a close drum mic into a reverb, then a compressor, then the gate, with the same drum signal keying the gate.^[3]

Where do people release what they make?

Mostly themselves, at first. Self-released records are common in the archive, and labels such as NewRetroWave and FiXT Neon sign the ones that grow. The Night Drive station (92.0 FM) shows what finished records sound like, and A short history of synthwave, from French blogs to the charts explains how the scene formed.

Sources

1. Roland Icon Series: The JUNO-106 Synthesizer · Roland
2. Classic Tracks: A-ha 'Take On Me' · Sound On Sound, Mar 2011
3. Gated reverb (used as a map to its references) · Wikipedia
4. Discovering Digital FM: John Chowning Remembers · Yamaha Music, 17 Aug 2020
5. What Does the Future Hold for Timecop1983? · Vehlinggo, 1 Jul 2015
6. Catching Up With Mitch Murder, King of the 80s Revival · Vehlinggo, 26 Jul 2015
7. Q. What does a compressor's sidechain do? · Sound On Sound, Jan 2004
8. Surge XT · Surge Synth Team
9. More 1980s than the 1980s: Hauntological and Hyperreal Meanings of Synthwave Soundtracks · Mattia Merlini, Sound Stage Screen 3(1), 2023
10. The TR-808 Story · Roland
11. On the "Katana ZERO" Score, Synthwave Goes Neo-Noir · Shaun Brady, Bandcamp Daily, 13 May 2019
12. Waveshaper (musician) · Wikipedia