How Wham! Created Last Christmas
Wham!’s Last Christmas is one of the most enduring and successful Christmas songs of all time, but did you know it was recorded using only a LinnDrum, a Roland Juno-60, a bass guitar, and sleigh bells? All parts were recorded by George Michael, and according to Michael’s engineer Chris Porter, recording was “laborious” due to George’s limited musicianship, but the sessions were ultimately successful and a veritable Christmas classic was born.
The main strings sound in Last Christmas came from the Juno-60 and can be created in TAL U-NO-LX. From the default patch, turn off the sub-oscillator, turn on the square wave oscillator, and set the PW fader to 5 with the LFO mode (we’re modulating the pulse-width with the LFO). In the LFO section, set trigger mode to key and LFO speed to 4.69 Hz.
For the filter, lower the cutoff to 7.55, change the VCA mode to ENV, and set the ADSR envelope with an attack, decay and release of around 3-3.5, and no sustain. You can play with these values a little, but you want a patch with a soft attack that releases quickly, so you can play staccato chords. Lastly, turn on the Chorus II effect to get that classic ensemble sounds. There are actually two tracks of this patch in the song, the first is panned slightly right and plays from the beginning, and the second is panned slightly left and comes in with the vocals at 0:18.
The organ patch that comes in at 0:36 is a classic Juno organ patch, and the Juno-60 preset Organ 3 was likely used for the track. I used the Organ preset as a starting point, and increased the filter envelope amount, decay and sustain slightly, to make it slightly richer and closer to the organ sound on the track.
The bells that play the melody sounds like it could come from a digital synth, such as the Yamaha DX7, however, bell sounds like this are possible on the Juno synths, and with close listening can hear the Juno ensemble effect. The Juno-60 Mellow Piano preset may have been used as the basis of the track, but the sound is easy enough to recreate from scratch using a pulse-wave, a mostly closed filter, some subtle envelope pluck, and the chorus effect.
In the video below I’m using SamplePhonics LinnDrum sample pack for drums and Brian Funk’s Sleigh Bell pack for percussion, with bass coming from my Fender P-Bass.
Downloads & Related
Download the Presets
Get the Ableton Projects
Get the Ableton Live Projects for my remakes on the Projects Store. All projects have frozen tracks in case of missing plugins and all downloads include multitracks and MIDI files for use in other DAWs.
Read Me Next
Support the Site
Article Comments