Solange recently released her fourth studio album, When I Come Home, following up the highly acclaimed A Seat at the Table. The new album is still rooted deeply in R&B and soul, but features a more electronic and psychedelic vibe, with modern trap influences also playing a part. Synths are at the forefront of her new sound, being used prominently on several songs such as Way to the Show and Almeda. The album features a diverse cast of collaborators, including Tyler, the Creator, Sampha, Panda Bear, Pharrell, and Dev Hynes aka Blood Orange. In this article I’ll look at some of the synth heavy tracks from When I Come Home, and discuss how to create the synth patches using several software synths.

Way to the Show

Way to the Show is one of the albums first examples of a psychedelic influence, and the track features a backdrop of funky synth bass and swirling keys. The funky bass is a thick and punchy, and was likely recorded on a Moog synth, and the patch is easy to set up in Arturia Mini V, a software emulation of the legendary Minimoog synth. Set the tuning of oscillators 1 and 2 to 32’ and oscillator 3 to 16’. Leave the waveforms set to sawtooth, but lower the detune amount of oscillator 2 & 3 by right clicking the tuning knobs until fine tuning is less than 1%. Less detune is good for tight basslines, and helps retain clarity. Lower the filter’s cutoff frequency all the way down, set the filter emphasis to the 4 mark, and raise the amount of contour knob to the 5 mark. For the envelope, set the attack time to 10ms, decay to 306ms and sustain to 0. This will move the filter in time with the envelope settings, and the filter emphasis will create the funky squelch effect.

For the keys patch, you can use any suitable polyphonic synth, and I’ll use Arturia Prophet V. The patch uses two detuned sawtooth oscillators, so use the template preset Pro5 2 Osc as a starting point. Now we want to modulate the filter, just like the bass patch, however with a much longer envelope setting. Set the cutoff to 0, resonance to 11 o’clock, and envelope amount to the 2 o’clock mark. Now set the filter’s envelope with a medium-long attack time of 90ms and a long decay time of 5500ms. The patch is simple, but the envelope movement helps keep it interesting. Another highlight of the track include the lead synth in the outro, which I didn’t include in the video below. To my ears, it sounds like a synth run through an auto-wah guitar pedal, which is effectively an envelope controlled filter.