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Everybody Wants to Rule the World was the third single from Songs from the Big Chair, Tears for Fears’ second album, which was released in 1985. Four decades later, the album is still a landmark of ’80s synthpop, and Everybody Wants to Rule the World is still its standout song.
Originally titled Everybody Wants to Go to War, the track is built around a bouncy, anthemic 12/8 shuffle feel—a big shift from the moodier tone of their debut album. Despite the change, Tears for Fears still relied on their synthesizer and drum machine-heavy setup to craft the album.
Everybody Wants to Rule the World was the final track recorded for the album, it was written and recorded in under two weeks. It became the band’s biggest hit, reaching No. 1 in the US, and has remained a classic ’80s music staple since, appearing in films like Donnie Darko, Ready Player One, and The Hunger Games, and being covered by artists such as Lorde and Weezer.
The song has a rich, layered production and makes heavy use of MIDI sequencing, which was a new technology when the song was recorded in 1984. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Songs from the Big Chair, I’ve revisited Everybody Wants to Rule the World to break down its instrumentation and production, recreating the song with modern software synths.
Here’s my full remake, which doesn’t use any samples from the original song:
Producer Chris Hughes and keyboardist Ian Stanley had worked with Tears for Fears since The Hurting. The band returned to Ian Stanley’s home studio in Bath to record most of Songs from the Big Chair.
Stanley’s studio featured a mixing console, analog tape machines, and an impressive collection of synthesizers, drum machines, and samplers, including the Yamaha DX7, PPG Wave 2.3, and Sequential Prophet T-8. Additional recording took place at Garden Studios and The Wool Hall, and the album was mixed at Union Studios in Munich.
The synthesizers were mostly sequenced using the UMI (Universal Musical Interface), a software-based MIDI sequencer running on a BBC Micro—a British home computer from the early 1980s. This system controlled the DX7, PPG Wave, and Prophet T-8, while the Fairlight CMI was used primarily as a sampler rather than for full sequencing.
Hughes recalled how sequencing shaped the recording of Everybody Wants to Rule the World:
“I had a little 8-bit computerized MIDI sequencer called a UMI, and I programmed those two chords and a bass line, and had that running on and off for days in the studio… if you put up the 2-inch masters of that song now, it almost mixes itself. It’s very straightforward.”
The same sequencer was also central to Shout, which took months of programming and layering to complete.
The opening of Everybody Wants to Rule the World features a combination of sampled choir, DX7 sequences, and electric guitar. The DX7 is introduced right from the start of the song, with the five-note descending lick that opens the track. Most of the DX7 sounds in Everybody Wants to Rule the World are layered, with two different DX7 presets playing the same sequence.
While it’s possible that the band double-tracked a Yamaha DX7 for these parts, it’s also possible they used a Yamaha DX1 instead. The DX1 was Yamaha’s high-end FM synthesizer, featuring dual DX7 tone engines, polyphonic aftertouch, and a premium build with wooden side panels. This would make it much easier to play dual-DX7 parts.
Tears for Fears owned a DX1 at some point, and Behringer later restored their unit, confirming its presence in their studio setup, though it may have been purchased after Songs from the Big Chair was recorded.
The DX1 and DX7 had been available for less than a year when Songs from the Big Chair was recorded, and the band stuck to factory presets rather than programming their own sounds. The opening lick sounds like the factory presets ROM1B 23-GUITAR 3 and ROM2A 23-VIBE 2 layered together.
This is followed by a three-note arpeggio, which is also doubled with electric guitar. It sounds like the ROM1B 02-PIANO 5 and ROM1A 23-KOTO factory presets were used here.
The DX7 parts are doubling an electric guitar, which I recorded using my Les Paul on the neck pickup through a Roland JC-120 patch on my Kemper Profiler. I’ll go into more detail about the guitar tones later in the article, but this layering adds a bright, glassy attack that complements the guitar tone.
The choir sound, which sustains a long note in the intro and plays a melody during the bridge, comes from the group’s Fairlight CMI, a sampler and workstation that was heavily used across Songs from the Big Chair, including several layers on Shout. The patch blends two samples: OOHH1, a softer, mellow sound, and CHOIR6, which has more high-end presence.
In my remake, I have them on separate tracks, with CHOIR6 mixed about 4dB lower and filtered at 2kHz to tame the high end. Detuning the CHOIR6 sample slightly also helps add natural thickness and chorus. I used Arturia CMI V to recreate this, here’s what it sounds like:
Everybody Wants to Rule the World’s iconic two-chord motif was recorded on a Sequential Prophet T-8 playing a patch that sounds like a rough approximation of a guitar. The Prophet T-8 is an upgraded version of the more famous Prophet-5, boasting full 8-voice polyphony, weighted keys, velocity, aftertouch, split and layer modes, and MIDI. The modulation worked slightly differently, as Orzabal said in a 1984 interview with One Two Testing:
“The Prophet T8’s even better than the Five, I think it’s my favourite analogue synth. I like the piano-weighted keyboard — in fact, everything I found wrong with the Prophet-5, like the fact that you had to use the modulation wheel for any modulation, seems to be put right on the T8. You’ve got in-built modulation, touch sensitivity, and I really like the Poly Mod.” — Roland Orzabal
I recreated the main Everybody Wants to Rule the World synth part using Arturia Prophet-5 V, a software emulation of the Prophet-5. The patch gets its distinct character from two pulse waves—Oscillator 1’s pulse width set to 31% and Oscillator 2’s set to 83%. The filter cutoff is set to 482 Hz with resonance around 1 and no keyboard tracking. Envelope amount is set to 3.75, with a 3.27-second decay and low sustain.
The patch also features pulse-width modulation, with the modulation wheel controlling its depth for both oscillators. The LFO rate is set to 6.82Hz, with a mod depth of 0.172. I added chorus from Prophet-5 V’s onboard chorus effect with dry/wet at 40% as well as some compression in Ableton Live.
I also think that the Prophet T-8 could have been used for the rhythmic synth part introduced at 1:05. The part just plays a single repeated note, and the patch is a simple dual sawtooth wave sound with one oscillator pitched up an octave.
The key to its percussive quality is a very short decay—filter decay is set to 356 ms, and amplifier decay is set to 393 ms. Amp release is set to a low 147ms and I programmed short note lengths for the sequence. I used Prophet-5 V’s onboard chorus again, this time set to 50%, and added an EQ to roll off 5 dB of low-end frequencies.
The Prophet T-8 chord patch is layered with some Rhodes-like keys, which are actually Yamaha DX keys. At first, these keys play alongside the Prophet, following the same two-note chord pattern, but in the verses, the Prophet drops out, leaving just the DX keys to carry the progression.
For the layered chord patch, they used two of the DX7’s stock electric piano sounds: ROM1A 08-PIANO 1 and ROM1B 01-PIANO 4. These are panned separately to create a wide stereo image, with PIANO 1 positioned to the left and PIANO 4 to the right.
In my Ableton project, I’ve set them to 25L and 25R to match the stereo spread heard in the original recording. Here’s what they sound like individually, and then layered together:
In the November 1985 issue of Keyboard Magazine, Ian Stanley mentioned that the bass synth sound on Everybody Wants to Rule the World was a combination of a “MIDIed PPG bassline mixed with a DX7.”
The DX7 preset used is ROM1B 32-BASS 4, a bright, punchy bass sound that is also velocity-sensitive—meaning the dynamics of the performance affect the tone. In my Ableton project, I’ve set the velocity to the maximum MIDI value of 127, which closely matches the attack and consistency heard on the record.
The PPG Wave layer comes from a modified version of the 013 A preset, with the oscillator wave setting lowered and the filter envelope depth reduced.
For the remake, I used Waldorf’s PPG Wave 3 VST plugin to recreate the sound. The DX7 provides the low-end and the PPG creates the high-end clickiness that helps cut through the mix. Here’s what both bass layers sound like individually and then played together:
The drum sounds in Everybody Wants to Rule the World come from a variety of sources. Tears for Fears used the new Fairlight and Emulator samplers as well as the sample-based drum machines that were new to the market in the early ’80s. For Songs from the Big Chair, the band were using a LinnDrum, a Drumulator, an Oberheim DMX as well as their trusty Fairlight for drum sounds.
The MixOnline article says that the Everybody Wants to Rule the World kick drum sound came from the Fairlight; however I couldn’t find any factory Fairlight samples that matched the kick sound in the song.
The songs credit’s include Ian Stanley, Manny Elias and producer Chris Hughes all credited with Oberheim DMX, so I’m guessing the DMX was sampled on the Fairlight and sequenced back on that. For this remake, I layered a DMX kick with a LinnDrum kick, which closely matched the sound on the original track.
The hi-hat and shaker sounds are classic LinnDrum sounds. The song has a bouncy 12/8 triplet feel with the shaker playing steady triplet 1/8th notes and the hi-hats playing a syncopated pattern, which together create a cross-rhythm. The hi-hats rhythm sounds weird in isolation, but complements the rest of the beat. The groove was actually inspired by Simple Mind’s Waterfront and Linx’s Throw Away the Key.
The MixOnline article states that the snare in Everybody Wants to Rule the World is the snare from Shout pitched up. To my ears, they sound like different snares; the snare on Everybody Wants to Rule the World sounds more like a classic ’80s gated snare drum, as opposed to the crunchy Drumulator sample heard on Shout. For the remake I used a snare sample from Zenhiser’s “Classic 80’s Snares” sample pack. Here’s the full beat:
Alongside the live guitar tracks, Everybody Wants to Rule the World features two sampled guitar tracks, which creates a robotic-sounding feel. These samples are short, one-shot guitar plucks which are repeatedly triggered, creating a somewhat mechanical sound that some composers call the “machine gun effect”. This type of sampling can sound unnatural, but in this case, the sampled guitars are buried in a busy mix, making them more of a subtle texture.
The first sampled guitar part plays a palm-muted low D in the same bouncy triplet rhythm as the bass in the verses. To recreate the sound, I recorded a palm-muted low E on guitar and loaded into Ableton’s sampler, triggering it a step lower than recorded. The second sampled guitar plays during the choruses and follows a similar idea, but instead of a single note, it’s a palm-muted fifth (or power chord).
These samples were likely recorded onto the Fairlight CMI, which Tears for Fears used extensively on Songs from the Big Chair. The Fairlight’s sample memory was limited, so samples had to be short.
It’s interesting that despite having plenty of live guitars on the track, they opted to sequence these parts with samples instead. Maybe they preferred the tighter, more controlled rhythm, or they simply wanted to experiment with the Fairlight’s sampling capabilities.
The guitars in Everybody Wants to Rule the World have a clean, bright tone, likely recorded with a Fender Stratocaster through a Roland JC-120 amp, which was Roland Orzabal’s live setup at the time.
I recorded all of the guitar parts with my Les Paul, using the bridge pickup for a bright sound. However, I wasn’t quite able to match the Stratocaster tone on the original recording. I recorded through my Kemper Profiler with a JC-120 preset, adjusting the amp EQ to cut the bass and boost the treble for even more high-end.
For most of the guitar parts, I used Ableton’s Chorus Ensemble to add movement and width. On some tracks I also added Arturia Chorus DIMENSION-D, a software emulation of the Roland Dimension D, a classic ’80s studio chorus widener, to add stereo width.
The outro guitar solo was played by guitarist Neil Taylor, who also played on The Seeds of Love. It’s very ’80s-sounding—highly distorted with wide vibrato.
To recreate the guitar sound, I used the same JC-120 preset but boosted the amp gain for distortion. I recorded using the neck pickup and reduced the treble on the amp for a darker, warmer sound.
The production of Everybody Wants to Rule the World features a spacious, washy reverb that was typical of ’80s records. Rather than applying reverb to every track individually, I set up a single reverb return channel in Ableton Live and sent most tracks to it in varying amounts. I used Valhalla VintageVerb with the Small R-Hall preset, adjusting the low cut to remove excessive bass. This approach helped glue the mix together while maintaining clarity.
You can hear how the full mix sounds with and without the reverb below:
Below is a complete list of all the interviews and articles I referenced throughout this article:
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.
Header artwork by Olya Makar
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Amazing! Great breakdowns and explanations of what was happening in this recording. Thanks for taking the time to dive in and provide these resources!
Glad you enjoyed it! Appreciate you checking it out.
How do I import the files into my prophet plug in on fl studio?
Click ‘Import’ in the top left menu and choose the .pro5x files in the file browser.
I didn’t see any file named that is it supposed to be in the Arturia folder I’m using Windows
Download it from the ‘Download the Presets’ image link above.
All I see in the tears for fears synth sounds folder is no pro5x file
CMI V Bank tears for fears synth.cmix
DX7 V Bank tears for fears synths.dx7
Prophet V3 Bank tears for fears synths.pox
Those are the files from another article, the “Shout” article. They aren’t for Prophet-5 V, the Prophet bank is for the older version, Prophet V3. You need to download the file from this page, from the ‘Download the Presets’ image link above.
Thank you
I love these articles. Thank you so much!
This is outstanding work! Thank you very much.
You’re very welcome 🤝
Great work! This was a very magical album. When all put together, for some reason, these songs do not sound nearly as midi as they deserve to. Certainly nothing like Depeche Mode did at the time. Until recently I figured Songs From The Big Chair (which is one of my favorite albums ever) was more of an ensemble album and not really midi related at all. That’s probably due to the real sax solos and various guitar parts. This one is up there with stuff like Arcadia for me. I’ll mess around with the Fairlight more after this.
Good point, and mostly because of the live instrumentation I think. The real guitars in “EWTRTW” help mask how overly-sequenced everything else is, and the rhythm section in tracks—like “Head Over Heels” is all live which makes a big difference.