Thom Yorke recently released his third solo album, Anima. The album continues the musical progression started in 2006’s The Eraser and 2014’s Tomorrows Modern Boxes, and was worked on alongside Nigel Godrich, longtime Radiohead producer. Anima’s release was preceded by mysterious worldwide adverts for a ‘dream camera’, and some of the albums themes involve dreams.

Thom is a big fan of the Prophet synths, having used an SCI Prophet-5 with Radiohead on Kid A and a DSI Prophet 08 in later live performances. Since 2015, Thom has been using a Prophet-6 live, and it’s likely this synth that many of Anima’s sounds came from. The Prophet-6 is important enough to the sound of Anima that Godrich uses a second unit offstage for live shows. The Prophet-6 is a faithful-yet-modern tribute to the vintage Prophet-5 synth, with all the character of the original synth, but with modern perks. For this article, I’ll use the fantastic softsynth u-he Repro-5, another tribute to the Prophet-5, to recreate some of Thom’s Prophet sounds from Anima.

Twist

I’ll start with the warm, swelling pad in the song Twist. The elements to this sound are a shallow vibrato and a long attack applied to both the filter and the amplifier. I’ll create the patch in Repro-5, but most analog-style polyphonic synthesizers will also work. Start with detuned sawtooth waves and lower the filter cutoff almost all the way closed. Set both envelope times with a long attack time (75 in Repro), medium decay (50), full sustain, and an extended release time (60). Apply the envelope to the filter by raising the envelope amount knob to halfway, which with the long attack time will create a swelling effect.

For the vibrato, we want a medium-fast LFO speed with a low amount of pitch modulation. In Repro, vibrato is applied by activated the Freq A and Freq B buttons in the Mod Wheel section and then raising the mod wheel slightly. Set the LFO rate to 67 for the same vibrato speed as Twist. To have more control over the modulation amount, you can set the lower and higher modulation limits by adjusting the red and white triangles next to the mod wheel. I also applied delay and vibrato to the patch using Repro’s onboard effects.

Check the video out below to hear the Repro patch in action. The layered piano in the video came from NI’s Alicia’s Keys library processed with ValhallaRoom.