One of the things I like to do to break up the creative cycle is to noodle around with music. As some of you may recall, I’ve played music in several different genres on a number of different instruments — bass, keys, guitar, 12-string guitar, mandola, drums/percussion (short-lived at the throne), and generally anything that comes my way (tabletops, trash percussion, violin bow on electric bass, vocal experimentation, etc.).
Below is the product of my noodling around last night.
My goal over the two or three hour period was to return to that early post-punk/darkwave sound that has found a resurgence in recent years with bands like Kælan Mikla and Mochat Doma (Молчат Дома), with leanings towards the sounds of Joy Division and early Cure.
Because I was playing bass guitar for that kind of music “back in the day”, I never really thought too hard at the time about how that sound was created. I focused on my bass and let everyone else do their thing. And, seeing we were a three-piece band at the time, we trended more into the guitar/bass/drum/vocals sound than to the synth sound. We had one, but we were very synth-lite. And being the nominal keyboardist with no idea of what he was doing with bass or keyboards at the time, we largely avoided keyboards (and embarrassments) with a few exceptions.
For this piece, I first sequenced a pretty basic synth drum machine pattern to give me a rhythm to work from. I wanted low- or no-cymbal, punchy with a beats per minute at somewhere between 100-150 bpm (it ended up feeling best at 120 bpm).
Then… to find the synth sound I was looking for — which took approximately half the time spent writing this piece.
It’s not easy to find softsynth sounds in 2025 that really capture the feel of that 80s “big” synth sound — they’ve basically gotten much more advanced and, as such, synths are complex sound generators when I wanted something more than a standard analog tone (that exists as well), but not mutilayered polyphonic with synth/bell/piano/strings/glass folded into a single sound.
But I found one I liked (several, in fact): a modernized “warm power saw lead” ended up being the bass range sound I was looking for here. Lush and low on aggro, yet with enough edge to not be airy. Note to self: I think I like Saw waves for this genre and sound.
Beefy sound, certainly, but it needed some higher-register melodies to balance out the heavy end, so I stole my daughter’s new electric guitar and played around with something else that I never had much call to use (or money to buy the necessary pedals): digital delay and phase to try to get a Cure-like sound (mixed with a chorusing effect, of course, as that was a standard effect used in the 80s across all genres). Just a hint of feedback/distortion to bring out the phase sound (but not to the point of flange). While not perfect, I was pleased with the feel of the sound. After all, I’m not trying to perfectly emulate Robert Smith’s distinctive sound, I’m trying to go for the vibe of the era. It could use a few tweaks, but this is a songlet, not a song (yet?) — more proof of concept than an end-product.
The songlet felt like it needed another layer of sound at the end, so I tossed in some of those polyphonic bells for a background melody in a few places. More for structural support than to be heard in the foreground.
Of course, this is all very draft. Proof of concept, remember. If this were more than a demo, I would get into engineering and maybe adding vocals. And I may, but for now, I am happy with where it is at as a demo.
Let me know what you think in the comments. Hopefully I avoided channeling Peter Hook too much (as I did in my last songlet) and stayed a little more “me”.
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