Retrograde

I initially struggled to replicate the synth in Retrograde, but the solution ended up being an obvious one. The patch consists of both oscillators detuned, one square and one sawtooth, with the filter left wide open. To clean the sound up a little I turned down the volume of the square wave oscillator a little. Why does this simple patch sound so good on Retrograde? It’s to do with how good the oscillators on the Prophet 08 sound, the voicings of the chords, and the way it sits in the mix on the recording. I suspected there were some effects applied to the Retrograde synth to make it sit so well in the mix, so I experimented with Ableton’s Flanger effect and came up with some pretty cool results. I ended up using the Techsys preset and dialling back the feedback to make it sound more natural. Check out the synth with, and without, the flanger effect.