Frank Ocean has recently returned with new music, dropping singles DHL and In My Room, his first new music since 2017. Both tracks are synth-heavy, and see Frank hinting at a bigger club-influence for his upcoming album.

In this article, I’m focusing on Frank’s latest single, In My Room, as well as going back to the synth sounds in Skyline To from Blonde, and Sideways from the video album Endless. All the sounds from these tracks have been recreated using the Arturia softsynths Prophet V and Mini V as well as Xfer Serum, and all the patches are available as a free download at the end of the article.

This is a follow-up to my Reverb.com guest article The Synth Sounds of Frank Ocean, where I mainly covered sounds from Blonde. The article was also recently turned into one of Reverb.com’s fantastic ‘Synth Sounds of’ videos with William Kurk.

Sideways

The crystalline synth pad on Sideways, which starts during the outro of Slide on Me, is one of the highlights of Frank Ocean’s video album Endless. The sound is a layered one, with at least two layers building on each other to create a rich wall of sound. The sound is also distinctly digital, reminiscent of 90s digital synthesizers and effects units.

The main synth is a filtered supersaw patch that can be created on modern synths with unison/detune, such as Xfer Serum. Set up a patch with two sawtooth waves, one pitched an octave up, and set the number of unison voices in each to 5 with detuned set between 0.09 – 0.15. Set the filter type to MG Low 24 with a resonance of 27% and adjust the filter as you play to open and close the sound. For effects, add chorus and reverb to make the sound even richer.

I also used D16’s Decimort 2 with 8-bit resolution and the resampling filter set to 7kHz to recreate the digital lo-fi texture of the track. The chords are all major 9th chords (R, 3rd, 5th, 7th and 9th), with the pitchbend wheel used to glide between chords.