Drive is a stylish neo-noir crime drama that blends striking visuals with an iconic soundtrack that elevates its character-driven storytelling. Released in 2011, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and featuring an excellent cast led by Ryan Gosling, the film’s music shifts between dreamy ambient cues for quiet, introspective moments, synthwave tracks that paint a neon-soaked Los Angeles, alongside grittier pieces that underscore bursts of stylistic violence.
Cliff Martinez created the film’s original score, which is mostly comprised of ambient pieces. These iarenterwoven with modern synthwave tracks like Kavinsky’s Nightcall and Desire’s Under Your Spell, which bring a retro-futuristic energy to the film. College & Electric Youth’s A Real Hero is featured prominently, recurring throughout the film and serving as an unofficial theme for The Driver’s character arc.
In this article I’ve recreated A Real Hero and Under Your Spell using Arturia Prophet-5 V and Mini V4, modern software instruments that emulate vintage synthesizers. This article is an updated version of my original “Drive Synth Sounds” article published in 2019. This updated version includes brand new presets for the latest versions of Prophet-5 V and Mini V4, allowing you to explore these defining tracks from the soundtrack in your own music.
A Real Hero
One of the standout tracks in Drive is A Real Hero, a collaboration between College and Electric Youth. The song features vocals by Electric Youth’s Bronwyn Griffin, with production and songwriting shared by Austin Garrick (the other half of Electric Youth) and David Grellier, who performs under the moniker College.
The song draws inspiration from a comment made by Garrick’s grandfather, who described Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who famously landed a passenger plane safely on the Hudson River, as “a real human being and a real hero.” This phrase became the song’s chorus and title, with the verses directly referencing the incident. In Drive, the song is used to underscore the journey of Ryan Gosling’s Driver as he navigates between being a quiet loner and displaying acts of selfless courage, becoming “a real hero”. It is played several times in the film, including during the films ending.
Here’s my full remake of A Real Hero, created without using any samples from the original song. The original track is about 35 cents flatter than concert pitch, likely repitched after recording, whereas my remake is in concert pitch.
A Real Bass
A Real Hero is built around a chunky-sounding bass playing plucked 1/8th notes with a vintage mono sound. For my remake, I used Arturia Prophet-5 V in unison mode, which stacks its five voices into a single monophonic sound, producing a thick texture with 10 oscillators in total. Unlike modern stereo unison modes, the Prophet-5’s unison is mono, which has a more vintage sound. Modern basses tend to be wide, vintage basses tend to be mono.
The A Real Hero bass patch uses a sawtooth wave and a square wave, with oscillator 2 detuned slightly by 9 cents to add fatness. However, I have the unison detune set to its minimum value to keep the sound relatively tight and focused.
To create the pluck, I set the filter cutoff to 171 Hz, with an envelope amount of 3.4. The filter envelope has a snappy decay time of 490ms with no attack or sustain. I set resonance to 2 which adds brightness to the pluck. The amp envelope mostly follows the filter envelope, with a decay of 660ms, sustain set to 0.3, and release times matching the decay for smooth tails when notes are released.
For bass effects, I used Soundtoys Decapitator with Drive set to 4 for saturation, added an EQ boost at 420 Hz for mid-range presence, and applied compression at the end of the chain. Here is the bass sound without the effects:

Real Synth Strings
The synth bass is joined by an offbeat arpeggio playing F-B♭-F-A throughout the track, and later, a high melodic part is introduced. Both parts use the same synth patch but I have them split into separate tracks in my project for better control over their levels and effects.
This patch relies on a low filter, a soft attack, and heavy use of effects to achieve the dreamy sound. I used Arturia Prophet-5 V in unison mode again for its thick, detuned oscillator sound. The patch uses a single oscillator set to a sawtooth wave, with the filter cutoff pulled down to 66 Hz and no keyboard tracking. The envelope amount is set to 5.16, with a soft attack of 68ms, decay around 1.2 seconds, and a high sustain level of 7.4. The amp envelope mirrors these settings, with matching attack and release times for a cohesive sound.
I used Prophet-5 V’s onboard effects to recreate the dreamy effects. I used the Chorus Jun-6 effect for its lush 80s sound, delay with mix set to 25%, and reverb with mix set to a high 50%. I added compression after these effects, which helps to squash the delay and reverb tails, adding to the dreamy ambience. To make the melody track stand out, I also added some stereo widening.
The arpeggios and melody mainly accent the upbeats—the notes that fall between the main beats—giving the song an energetic feel. Compare the difference in groove between the versions with and without drums below:

Under Your Spell
Under Your Spell is another memorable track in Drive, playing during the party scene when Standard (played by Oscar Isaac) returns home from prison. The song, by the Canadian band Desire, blends buzzy synths with a hypnotic guitar loop for an atmospheric feel. Desire consist of Johnny Jewel of Chromatics with Megan Louise on vocals; they released Under Your Spell from their 2009 album II. The track has become their most famous song, also featured in the film Oslo, August 31st and sampled in Kid Cudi’s WZRD project song Teleport 2 Me, Jamie. Here’s my remake:
Bassline
The track opens with a wide, detuned bassline over tribal-sounding electronic drums. This bassline has a stereo width that likely comes from doubling and panning two bass tracks left and right, rather than stereo unison. Alongside this, a third track plays a higher melodic line in the intro, creating a nice harmony.
To recreate the sound, I used Arturia Mini V4 with three detuned sawtooth oscillators for the bass patch. I then duplicated the track and hard-panned them separately left and right. To widen the sound, I added some subtle adjustments to the right channel patch by slightly closing the filter and adding a tiny amount of slow oscillator vibrato. Mini V4’s analog emulation features also introduce natural differences between the doubled tracks, adding to the wide detuned sound.
Below, you can hear the bassline broken into three parts: the mono track, the doubled stereo tracks, and the stereo tracks combined with the intro melodic bassline:

Lead Synth
The lead synth in Under Your Spell has a distinctive bright, buzzy tone that sounds like it could have been recorded through a guitar amp. During certain moments, such as the ascending scale at 1:21, the lead is doubled in octaves for a thicker sound.
I recreated this patch using Mini V4 again, also using detuned sawtooth oscillators but with more detune than the bass; Oscillator 2 is detuned to -13 cents, and Oscillator 3 is set to +10 cents, creating a loose, rich texture. The Advanced panel LFO adds subtle vibrato with a rate of 4.56 Hz and a low intensity of 0.005.
For effects, I set Mini V4’s Drive knob to halfway to add some distortion, and then added EQ and filter effects in the Advanced Effects panel to recreate the high-end buzz of the original sound. I utilised a high-pass filter at 75 Hz to remove low-end, a moderate (4.5dB) boost at 1.8 kHz, and then a low-pass filter at 6.3 kHz. To really shape the sound, the resonance of the low-pass filter is set to a very high 2.87, and the slope is set to 12dB/oct, which results in a much gentler, cleaner sound than Mini V4’s main front panel filter. The resonance boost adds tons of treble to the track.
I used three instances of this lead patch: the main melody plays on its own, while the ascending scale run at 1:21 uses two tracks doubled in octaves and panned to 20L and 20R; these two tracks don’t have the EQ and filter effects.

Guitar
The hypnotic guitar arpeggio is one of the defining sounds in Under Your Spell. To recreate it, I used Ableton Live’s Chorus-Ensemble effect with a slow rate (1.28 Hz), high modulation amount (80%) and a mix of 60%. This chorus effect adds the movement and dreamy shimmer to the arpeggio; which also stops it from sound monotonous.
For the band-pass effect, I used an EQ to remove low and high frequencies to isolate the midrange. This is achieved by combining a high-pass filter cutting below 813 Hz and a low-pass filter rolling off above 1.66 kHz, with a 9 dB boost at 1.42 kHz to emphasize the mid-range frequencies. The result is a focused sound that feels intimate, as though recorded through a small, lo-fi speaker. This combination of chorus and EQ gives the arpeggio its distinct character, allowing it to sit prominently in the mix without clashing with other elements.


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