Making LCD Soundsystem-Style Drones

Build a sound inpired by the pumping harmonic drone from LCD Soundsystem’s Someone Great with u-he’s Diva, then put it to work across several genres.

If you’ve followed some of the recent Synth Secrets you’ll know that we love versatile patches. In other words, sounds that – with just minimal tweaks to the envelope or notes – can be used for a range of different genres or parts in an arrangement.

Another great example of this can be found in LCD Soundsystem’s classic, Someone Great. Right from the start it features a rich, pumping, harmonic drone. That sound alone would be worth dissecting, but once you do, you quickly discover a load of other uses for it in your tracks.

And it’s all the cooler for the fact that the sound itself is just a single sawtooth wave playing the right notes with a bit of modulation. Plus, critically, EQing / filtering.

It sounds like this…

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Step 1

The simpler the patch, the more important it is to pick the right sound source, and for this we want rich, analogue vibes. So let’s start, as we so often do, by loading Diva and selecting a blank ‘init’ patch. Now load a Dual VCO and Analogue Env for envelopes 1 and 2. And set the BPM to 112. It’s a bit more of a sedate pace than the original but that lets us focus more clearly on the effect of the modulations.

Step 2

Now we need the right notes and it turns out there’s a fifth or fourth note interval thing happening here: a dyad (two note chord) using G and D. Why fourth or fifth? Because we’ve actually got three D notes (D2, D3, D4) playing with the G3 sitting squarely between two of them, so it depends which D we consider the root note! As for length, set them just shy of a quarter note.

Step 3

Getting back to Diva, disable Oscillator 1, leave oscillator 2 on the default sawtooth wave, tune oscillator two up an octave (that’s the number 4 setting on the knob) and rotate the VCO 1 / VCO 2 blend fully clockwise to VCO 2 only. Raise the Cutoff up to 108 and dial the Emphasis to 15.5. Listening to it now, we’re actually pretty close already.

Step 4

We want some control of the note velocities to shape the tone of the patch. First set the velocity of the D2 note to full and the remaining three to 103. Next map velocity to control the volume of the notes in the VCA section by selecting Velocity as a modulator from the dropdown and then dialling up the modulation amount to maximum. Now our sound is a bit richer and has more bite. 

Step 5

There’s one critical tonal element missing: EQ filtering. To better match the target patch cut a notch around four bands: 150Hz, 300Hz, 600Hz, and 1.2kHz. Notice two things about those frequencies: 1. Each is double the previous, therefore one octave up from the last. 2. They’re all hovering just around the frequency of the note D. So by cutting the root frequencies of those D notes, we’re emphasising that G. 

Step 6

Let’s add pumping with envelopes and modulation… and we need a kick to judge the timing. Load a big, 909-style kick drum into a new channel now and let it play. On Env 1 set Attack to around 49 which instantly adds pump. Listening carefully to how they change the groove, set Decay 75, then set a slightly longer release tail of 29. And raise the VCA volume to full to bring the volume back up.

Step 7

Now you can complement the amp envelope pumping with a little filter envelope action too. First dial the Env 2 filter modulation to fully +. Then go to Env 2 and, listening closely as you adjust, set the following: Attack 68 and Decay 49, and Sustain 0. Notice how we’ve both emphasised the pump and added more bite and tonal interest to the sound?

Step 7 result:

Step 7 result with LCD beat.mp3:

Step 8

To really match LCD’s original track we need a little bit of processing. Add Diva’s Plate 1 reverb with the Size set to maximum and the pre-delay dialled up halfway. The long pre-delay is because sound takes time to cover distance in real spaces, so if you make a sound in a large room there’s an audible gap before the sound is reflected off the boundaries and returns to your ears as reverb. 

Step 9

We can add some sidechain compression pumping too, using the kick channel as the trigger. This plays nicely with the envelope-controlled pumping we already have. And last but not least, add tape drive saturation for vibes. Add this after the sidechain pumping because tape saturation harmonics increase with stronger signals, so the sidechain pumping creates more harmonics on the louder part of the pump!

Step 10

We said from the start this is a versatile sound and we meant it. Both of these below examples are the exact same drone patch, just with a more percussive envelope shape. 

Big Belgian Snog Trumpet.h2p:

Big Trumpet.h2p:

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