Tears for Fears’ Songs from the Big Chair was released in 1985 and spawned the hits Shout, Everybody Wants to Rule the World and Head Over Heels. A new-wave classic, the album is a masterclass of songwriting and production, and it has a more mature feel than many albums of their contemporaries.

Tears for Fears, a duo consisting of Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith, are primarily songwriters, rather than producers, and they switch roles frequently when collaborating. Around the time of Songs from the Big Chair they were joined by key member Ian Stanley who acted as the bands keyboardist. By this point the group owned an enviable collection of analog synthesizers:

“Their layered style of recording also made it easier to work from Stanley’s home studio, which the band had recently upgraded using advance money from the second album. Stanley’s newly expanded home studio included a 32-channel Soundcraft console, a 24-track analog tape machine and room for the band’s keyboard and synthesizer collection, which included such classic designs as Sequential Circuits Prophet 5, Fairlight CMI, Roland Jupiter 8, Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and PPG Wave. They also had a LinnDrum LM-2, another recent acquisition.”

The album’s slick sound was a result of utilising at-the-time brand new technology, as well the duo’s perfectionism. Many of the synth tracks are used as a complement to the songwriting, sitting alongside live instruments to form an overall cohesive artpiece. In this article I’ll concentrate on their breakout track Shout, uncovering the many layers of sounds, many of which came from the CMI Fairlight sampler.

Shout

Shout went on to become one of the most recognisable songs from the mid-eighties and is also recognised as the group’s signature song. Featuring a repetitive chorus, power chords and an intense rock backing, the song was a no. 1 hit for 3 weeks.

“Orzabal played Hughes a chant he had written called “Shout.” They stopped everything else to focus solely on that number, which would become their second Number One and one of the most recognizable songs of the decade. They spent many, many months on that powerful anthem alone, making sure that each layer worked perfectly with the others.”

Shout opens with a machine-like percussion loop followed by the hook sung over an ominous sounding synth bass. This simple-yet-iconic bass sound comes from the groups Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, and uses the synths unison mode, which sets all the available voices to double and slightly detune the same note, creating a thick sound great for basses.

To create the patch in Arturia Prophet V, start with two detuned sawtooth waveforms. Darken the sound by decreasing the cutoff to the 700 Hz ,and raise the resonance to 1. To add the unison thickness, first activate the unison button in the top-right of the Prophet-V interface. The detune knob will control the amount that each voice is detuned from the original, here we’ll turn it to a nice high 50%, which is nice and thick without sounding out-of-tune.

The bass track also has some stereo width, which will have been added at the mixing stage, as the Prophet-5 only has a mono output. To recreate it, add a light chorus effect, and then a vintage-style stereo widening plugin such as SoundToys MicroShift to push the sound into the sides of the mix.