How Beach House Created Space Song

Space Song is Beach House’s most popular song by a wide margin. Originally released on 2015’s Depression Cherry, it found a second life online within the last few years, turning up in countless memes and TikTok edits thanks to its dramatic sound.

I originally covered Space Song as part of my Beach House Synth Sounds article published in 2020, but I’ve now spun it out into its own article with an updated remake. The original remake relied on older plugins that are no longer available, such as Arturia Prophet V3 and Mini V3, so I’ve rebuilt the sounds using their newer replacements, Prophet-5 V and Mini V4.

The song is multi-layered with organ and string sounds, a quirky ascending arpeggio, chord stabs and woozy slide guitar melodies, all sitting in a big wash of reverb. Here’s my full remake:

The Space Song chord progression is played on a layered sound with high strings and a low organ. The strings drop out and the organ plays alone in the second verse, around 2:36.

The high strings have the sound of a string machine, combo keyboards popular in the 1970s, known for their lush, swirling ensemble string sounds. You can get close to the string machine sound by applying vibrato to one oscillator but not the other, then adding big effects. The two oscillators drift in and out of tune with each other, which creates a moving, chorus-like texture before any effects are added.

For my remake, I mainly used Arturia Prophet-5 V, a software emulation of the Sequential Prophet-5. In the string patch, LFO 2 is applied to Oscillator 1’s pitch, leaving Oscillator 2 untouched. The filter is left almost completely open, closed just a touch to 4334 Hz, with keyboard tracking disabled. Prophet-5 V’s onboard chorus and reverb effects finish the sound off. Here’s what it sounds like:

I recreated the lower organ sound using Arturia B3 V, using the Gimme Some Lovin preset as a starting point. I disabled the onboard distortion and reverb effects (open the FX tab, top-right), lowered the preamp drive all the way and tweaked the drawbars on the left-hand side to create a darker tone.

The chord stabs come in during the second half of the verse, around 1:18. They play the same chords as the string and organ stack, but higher and shorter, landing on beats 2 and 4, a trick common in 60s music.

I recreated the stabs in Prophet-5 V using a mix of sawtooth, square and pulse waves, with Oscillator 2 pitched an octave lower than Oscillator 1. Oscillator 2’s volume is set lower in the mixer, so it adds low-end without overwhelming Oscillator 1. Prophet-5 V’s onboard chorus effect is used here too.

The ascending arp patch is my favourite sound in Space Song. It has a quirky sound that contrasts with Beach House’s sometimes dark tone.

To create the arpeggios I used Ableton’s Arpeggiator device in ascending mode, with the rate set to 1/16 and steps set to 3, which adds 3 octaves to the played chord. The retrigger setting is set to 1/2, which resets the arpeggiator every half bar, resulting in a pattern of 8 ascending notes even when you play chords with 3 notes.

For the synth sound I used Prophet-5 V again. It’s a simple patch: a single square wave with the filter wide open. LFO 2 adds vibrato to the pitch, which gives it that playful feel.

Underneath the ascending arpeggio there’s an organ playing 1/8th note chords. For this part I used the Organ 2 patch from my RM-20² pack. RM-20² is based on the Yamaha PS-20, a home keyboard that Victoria Legrand has used across all of Beach House’s albums. I EQ’d in a lot of brightness, with a boost of about 8 dB.

One additional sound comes in at the end of Space Song and really helps push the song in its final section. It’s a simple repeated arpeggio playing a four-note pattern, heard around 4:21. I recreated it in Prophet-5 V with a basic pulse wave patch, with the pulse width set to 77%. Here’s what it sounds like:

The bass in Space Song is a layer of bass guitar and synth. The synth can be heard on its own very briefly when the ascending arpeggios start.

I recreated the synth bass using Arturia Mini V4, a software emulation of the Minimoog Model D. The patch stacks three oscillators at 32′, 16′ and 8′, with the 8′ oscillator tuned down 5 semitones. That puts it a fifth (7 semitones) above the 16′ oscillator, which gives the bass a chunky, strong character.

This patch is then doubled with me playing 1/16th notes on a Fender Precision Bass.

The main guitar melody in Space Song is played on slide guitar and doubled in octaves. I used my Duesenberg lap steel guitar to record the parts, recording the octave-up and octave-down layers as separate tracks.

I grouped the two tracks and ran them both through the same effects chain. First there’s heavy EQ shaping, followed by Ableton’s Chorus-Ensemble device in Ensemble mode. This goes into a 180 ms delay at 35% wet, then Valhalla VintageVerb in the NOW colour mode at 38% wet. Here’s what the guitars sound like dry and wet:

There are two drum tracks in Space Song. The first is a drum machine loop that can be heard during the intro fade-in, followed by real drums when the guitars come in. I used drum samples to recreate the drum machine loop, and XLN Audio Addictive Drums 2 for the real drums.

A big part of the Space Song sound is the reverb wash over the whole mix. To recreate this, I set up another instance of VintageVerb as a send effect, this time using the 70s hall mode. Sending the different parts to it creates that washy sound that ties everything together.