In this article, I’m going to revisit Gossip, by Tame Impala. The short, instrumental piece, included on the 2015 album Currents, consists of a pulsating synth line and dry DI’ed guitar leads. The synth was recorded from a Roland JV-1080, a rack-mounted, digital synthesizer that used sampled elements to emulate a variety of sounds. I actually included a section on Gossip in Part Three of my original Tame Impala synths series. However, I’ve decided to revisit it, along with a couple of other Tame Impala songs, in part because Roland has since released a software JV-1080 instrument as part of their Roland Cloud library of instruments. It is a subscription-based service but comes with a one-month free trial.

Gossip

To find the patch that Kevin Parker used in Gossip, open the Roland JV-1080 plugin and navigate to patch 99 in bank C, titled 099: Flying Waltz. This will open up the original unit’s patch, the same one used for Gossip. One adjustment he seems to have made to the patch is he changed the effect from Pitch Shifter to 4Tap Pan Delay, which can change by pressing the edit button and navigating to the MFX section.