pond

Tame Impala Synth Sounds

tame impala synth sounds 1

Tame Impala are due to release their new album The Slow Rush this week, a much-anticipated follow-up to 2016’s Currents. For this article, I’ll revisit a few of my favourite tracks from Currents and deconstruct their synth sounds, as well as the production techniques responsible for the wide sound that defines Currents. The main synths that Kevin Parker used on Currents are the Roland Juno-106 and the Roland JV-1080, two very different synths from different eras. The Juno-106 is a typical 80s synths, with a lush, chorused sound. The JV-1080 is more a of a 90s digital synth, capable of producing a variety of realistic patches.

Pond Synth Sounds

pond synth sounds

Pond recently released their seventh studio album The Weather and it’s fantastic, after my Sweep Me Off My Feet tutorial I’ve had a couple of requests for the synths in ‘Paint Me Silver’. What a lot of people don’t know is that the main hook is based on a Todd Rundgren & Utopia song called Cosmic Convoy. Although ‘Paint Me Silver’ starts out with a direct sample from ‘Cosmic Convoy’, the main hook is based on the lead lick later in the song overdubbed by the Pond members. I was lucky enough to see Pond on their recent tour and their live synth setup consisted of a Moog Sub Phatty, a Korg Poly-800 and a Dave Smith Prophet 08. They mostly used the Moog for basses and the Korg for chorused pad chords, and for ‘Paint Me Silver’ they used guitar for the lead, so it’s hard to tell what was used for the studio recording. I played with some differents synths and decided that the lead synth is either the Korg Poly-800 or a Roland Juno-106, which they also use regularly.