Kanye West’s seventh album, The Life of Pablo, was released in 2016 and eschewed a traditional release, instead being exclusive to Jay-Z’s Tidal streaming service for over a month upon release. The album has been revised several times since its release, with West reworking lyrics, adding guest vocals and tweaking the mix, going on to call the album a “living breathing changing creative expression.”. Four months after the album’s initial release it was again updated with an additional song, Saint Pablo, appended to the album. The song is built around a hip-hop beat comprised of a sample from the Jay-Z song Where I’m From, which is itself sampled from the 1975 Yvonne Fair song Let Your Hair Down. The sample has been layered with synth and piano chords to underpin Kanye’s personal rap verses and Sampha’s soulful chorus. At the beginning of the 3rd verse there is a synth breakdown with a Moog synth lead before the song returns to the 3rd verse.

Roland Juno-106

The main synth in the verses was recorded from co-producer Mike Dean’s Roland Juno-106, a cool 80’s synth famous for its classic, chorused sound. The patch is simple to program and can be recreated in TAL U-NO-LX, a software emulation of the Juno series. To set up the patch use a single sawtooth waveform and turn off the sub oscillator. Set both filters to the halfway mark to reduce the sound to the midrange and raise the LPF resonance to the 2 mark. Then raise the env slider to around the 5.5 mark to start modulating the filter with the envelope, and set the ADSR envelope with an attack of 4 and a decay of 5, creating movement in the filter. Lastly turn on the synths onboard Chorus effect, using the II mode to get the famous Juno chorus sound.