Christmas Synth Sounds
Hi! Christmas time is soon coming and with it all the classic festive music. For this special Christmas article, I’ll look at two classic Christmas songs that use synths as their main instrumental, and explore the synth sounds that make them. I’ll look at Wham!’s Last Christmas and Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime and the synth patches used to recreate the songs are available for free download at the end of the article. Let’s get started!
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.
- Last Christmas Strings 00:00
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.
- Last Christmas Organ 00:00
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.
- Last Christmas Bell 00:00
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.
Wonderful Christmastime
Wonderful Christmastime is one of those Paul McCartney tracks you either love or hate. It was recorded in 1979 for his second solo album, and the track was recorded entirely by McCartney. The track is built around a distinctive synth part with what sounds like a rhythmic delay effect. The synthesizer track in Wonderful Christmastime was recorded by Paul using the Yamaha CS-80, a legendary synth that’s mostly associated with being used by Vangelis on the Blade Runner soundtrack.
Paul’s CS-80 patch is a fun one to play, he likely started from the Bass preset, tweaked the envelopes and then added some reverse-sawtooth LFO modulation to the filter to create the delay-style effect. There was no way to sync the CS-80’s LFO to a clock, so Paul likely recorded the CS-80 track first, and then played the other instruments around it, timing them to fit with the rhythm created by the CS-80’s LFO.
I recreated the Wonderful Christmastime part using Arturia CS-80 V, a software emulation of the hardware legend. Start with the bass preset by pressing the 5 tone selector button in the 2nd row (II) and make sure the mix lever is set to the II position so we only hear the lower layer. Next to the mix lever, set the red Reso lever to 0.4440 to raise the resonance of all the filters at once. To add the filter modulation, go to the sub-oscillator section and set speed to around 3.16 Hz and VCF to 1.000. Make sure the waveform is set to the reverse-sawtooth shape, and fine-tune the speed depending on the tempo. Lastly, turn on the CS-80’s onboard chorus effect and raise the depth.
The strings in Wonderful Christmastime may have come from the Sequential Prophet-5 that Paul plays in the music video for the track, and for the recreation, I used Arturia Prophet-5 with a classic warm string preset. You can download both the main Arturia CS-80 V patch and the Arturia Prophet V string patches at the end of the article. Here’s my full remake:
Download
Thanks for reading and happy holidays! The TAL U-NO-LX and Arturia presets for all three tracks covered in the article can be downloaded below.
- Published on December 17, 2019
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- Published on December 17th, 2019
11 thoughts on “Christmas Synth Sounds”
This is the perfect Christmas gift. As always, thank you for sharing and for your extensive synth knowledge!
Please make some synth sounds of Honne, they have great Prophet sounds
Thanks for digging into and sharing it!
Hi, Thanks a lot for the insights. For Last Christmas I believe there are further patches of the main synth used. In the end it appears as there is also one with a much faster attack – what do you think?
I’m grateful I found your site. Thanks for your knowledge and always fantastic presets
Love this but such a headache with a click haha
I find this impossible to do. The delays keep getting out of sync. Did you figure out how to do it haha
The delays are getting out of sync if they’re not just on time. I mean that they are not landing on the eighth notes like in the song. Has this to do with the bpm? Can anyone tell me how to get this right?
On the bottom right part of the CS 80 screen. turn the Time dial’s setting down to 0.
There are other dials for Brightness, Movement, and Timbre shown, too, which may impact the patch’s sound. For real, this was a very satisfying find and fix.
Apologies. This is wrong. Disregard.
Whenever I hear McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime synths, I think of both ELO and Dave Greenslade.