The Tycho Sound

The most important thing about the Tycho sound is the use of reverb and delay, the space created is big and modulated but never muddy, and elements never get lost in the space. This is in part due to the use of compression after the reverb/delay to raise the volume of the tails in relation to the original sound, and aggressive EQing to carefully control the tonal quality of the signal. There is an inclination towards analogue gear, or analogue-emulations, that have a natural tendency to impart desirable distortion and saturation into the signal chain. Generally the signal flow looks something like this:

input – compression – heavy EQ – reverb – delay – heavy compression – EQ – output

Scott is incredibly open about his production methods, frequently answering questions and hosting reddit AMAs, he owns an envious collection of hardware synthesizers and effects unit, but also tends to mix things in-the-box with software plugins.

How do you go about melding traditional/organic instrumentation with electronic music without it sounding forced? That’s never been that difficult. I think it’s because I use so many effects on everything. At the end of it, sometimes the guitars end up sounding indistinguishable from a synth. Once you put enough reverb, compression, and delay on things, you can start to get things into the same space, no matter where the original tone came from. Basically, I’m kind of applying the same ideas to all the sources, so at the end of it, it becomes cohesive. – Scott Hansen

Plugins

I’ve tried to stick as closely as possible to plugin’s that Scott is known to use, however I’ve also tried to keep it as light as possible as Scott seems to use a lot of different plugins in his productions. Here’s a list of the plugin’s I’ll be using in this article:

Native Instruments Monark (Minimoog emulation, opens in NI Reaktor)

Valhalla VintageVerb (great versatile reverb)

Soundtoys EchoBoy (analog-style delay, really important)

PSP oldTimer (analog-style compressor)

Tycho’s sound has more to do with the effects and the order of those effects than it necessarily does with the synthesizer being used, if you don’t have access to the above plugins then make sure the alternatives you use are a moog emulation and the effects are analogue-style.

Awake Lead

For the lead synth in Awake you’ll need to program in a really simple single-oscillator triangle waveform patch and tweak the Filter and Filter Envelope so that the sound starts bright with a quick decay. This gives it a percussive quality that’s going to really play well when run through delay. Come back to this step after you’ve added the reverb/delay because tweaking the Filter Decay has a massive effect on the way the synth reacts with the reverb/delay. Set the attack slightly higher than 0 so you don’t get any clicking.