Drive came out in 2011, mixing stylish violence with a nostalgic soundtrack, and has become a modern classic. The film is influenced by European cinema and 80’s retro nostalgia, and it opened up the doors to similar 80’s retro-inspired works like The Guest, Stranger Things and It Follows. The original soundtrack features ambient works by Cliff Martinez, and also makes memorable use of several synthwave songs by artists such as Kavinsky, College and Electric Youth.

To recreate the movie’s most memorable sounds I’ll use Arturia Mini V, a software emulation of the legendary Minimoog synthesizer, Arturia Prophet V, and TAL U-NO-LX, an emulation of the classic 80’s Roland Juno synths. This article is a newly updated in January 2020, with a new section on the synths in Desire’s Under Your Spell.

Nightcall

I’ll start with Drive’s opening credit song, Kavinsky’s Nightcall. The track sets the mood for the rest of the movies with lush 80’s synths and a cool, driving beat. Nightcall is composed of two distinct sections, the vocoder-led verse, and the chorus section sang by Lovefoxxx. Despite the warm, analog sound, Kavinsky uses entirely soft synths.

“Your sound is to some degree nostalgic for a pre-computer electronic era. Have you come to collect vintage gear since?” “No, I just have a computer and a lot of things inside. I don’t have analog keyboards. Plug-stuff I hate.” – Kavinsky

The main synth sound in Nightcall is the chorused arpeggios that play throughout the song. TAL U-NO-LX is a great synth for 80s sounds, and can be used to create this sound. From the default settings, activate the square wave oscillator and set the PW fader to almost maximum to make it a narrow-pulse wave. Set the sub oscillator’s volume to halfway and optionally add some white noise to dirty the sound up.

Set the HPF filter fader, VCF frequency and resonance to halfway to filter the high and low frequencies, and add some plucked movement to the low-pass filter by raising the ENV fader to 3. Change the VCA mode to envelope and set the ADSR’s decay to 5, sustain to 0 and release to 4, which will create the tight plucking effect. Turn on the Chorus II effect to get that lush 80’s sound. To mix the sound, add a high-shelf EQ around 2.90 kHz and reverb with a mix level around 20%.