Arturia recently released a software version of the EMS Synthi, called Synthi V, which recreates the EMS Synthi, with some welcome modern additions. The Discreet Music patch is relatively simple to patch, and makes use of oscillator blending and the onboard reverb. Start by initialising Synthi V by opening the menu and choosing New Preset… to start a fresh patch.

For oscillators, the sound is a mellow sine/triangle wave made more interesting by mixing a small amount of sawtooth oscillator. On the Synthi, each oscillator outputs two different waveforms, which are routed to the filter via the patchbay grid. Oscillator 1’s sawtooth is patched by default, and we can also patch oscillator 1’s sine wave and oscillator 2’s triangle wave by placing a pin on the matrix dots 3H and 6H, lining the oscillator sources on the left with the filter input above. Balance the volume of the sawtooth wave by lowering oscillator 1’s saw level knob down to the 3 mark.

Set the filter by lowering the blue frequency knob in the filter oscillator section to just below halfway (0.472). I also added some subtle vibrato by patching oscillator 3’s triangle to the oscillator 1 & 2’s control inputs (I8 and J8), setting oscilator 3’s frequency nice and low, and the triangle’s volume level low to control the amount of vibrato modulation. Eno also would have likely added some built-in reverb from the Synthi, which will add ambience as well as darkening the sound, so raise the reverberation mix knob to 9.