Remaking the chords synth from the 2014 song "Resonance" by Home can be an exciting challenge for any synthesizer enthusiast. Here’s how you can create the "Resonance" chords patch and play this iconic sound on most hardware or software subtractive synthesizers (Serum, Vital, Pigments, Prophet, Korg, Moog, etc). We've included the preset download directly for your convenience, but we strongly recommend you use our programming tutorial to recreate it yourself.
Original Audio
The warm, wobbling synthesizer in Home’s “Resonance” establishes the track’s nostalgic atmosphere from the opening notes, featuring a rich blend of saw and basic waveform oscillators with subtle frequency modulation between them. This synth dominates the chord progression from the song’s start (0:00), providing the foundational texture that defines its vaporwave identity.
Original Performing Instrument
Unknown
Our Remake of The Chords Synth
This audio clip is how close we've matched the original tone of the chords synth from the song "Resonance" by Home, giving you a reference point as you design your own synthesizer preset. Play it as often as you need to familiarize yourself with the nuances of the sound.
Synth Patch Programming Recipe
Getting Started
- Start by initializing your synthesizer to a plain saw with no filter, modulation or effects. For soft synths use the "init"/"default" preset or the the button to reset all parameters to their default factory values.
- No two synths are exactly alike, so treat the values below as approximate, and use your ear.
- Percentage values (e.g. 50%) represent the relative position of a knob or slider within its full range. The full range of each parameter may differ from synth to synth, so use your ear.
- Oscillator: Saw Wave. Use Unison to make it washy and lush with 6 voices, kind of strong Detune, even Blend, and 0 Width
- Noise: White, low level so it’s just layered in. This helps create a vintage vibe, making it less clean. Make sure it’s routed into the filter.
- Filter: Lowpass with 18dB slope. Cutoff at 370 Hz and a bit of Res (these set us up to use an Envelope to make the wah character). Full Drive for saturated analog warmth, and a bit of Fat to make up for the low end taken away by Res. Reduce the level to make up for Drive’s volume boost
- Amp Envelope: About 6 ms of Attack to soften the transient just a bit. Sustain at 0, and both Decay and Release at 2 seconds so we have nice long notes.
- Voices: Poly, 4 voices. The chords are mostly 4 notes each, so this way each chord will cut off the notes of the previous chord so we don’t get layered and dissonant notes
- Filter Envelope: Route Env 2 to Filter Cutoff. Attack at 53 ms, Sustain at 0, and Decay and Release at 0.5 ms. Modest Amount (about 20). This will create a really tight wah. Too tight in fact, but that is because…
- Velocity: Route Velocity to Env 2 Decay and Release, and max out both of there amounts. Now, lightly pressed notes will give us a quick and closing wah, and hard-pressed notes will create a big bright sound, that still wahs up, but doesn’t wah back down (at least not for a long time). This is why the pad is sometimes bright, and sometimes closed. But no matter what, you still get that fat horn-ish attack since the attack time is always the same.
- Chaos: Route Chaos 1 (Sample & Hold LFO on any synth will have a similar effect) to Master Tune, and set a VERY small amount. I set the Amount slider in the Matrix to 1, and dial back the Output slider to 25. Just a mild out-of-tune sound that really starts to bring in the vintage vibe
- Note: Make sure the following effects are in the order of this list.
- Delay: Pretty heavy mix at 40%, pretty long Feedback so it echos for a while. Rate at 1/16th (bpm is 83). To make it Stereo, set the Right offset to 1.050. I love how the Velocity-controlled envelope interacts with the Delay. Light notes that have a tight closing wah, create a very audible echo, but the more open and washy notes generated by hard presses, cover up the echo a bit. So the Delay comes and goes depending on how hard you hit the keys
- Reverb: Plate. Medium-Small size (17%), No Pre-Delay so our sound really sits in the reverb. Fairly heavy mix at 34%. Default settings of a little High Cut, a little Damping, and a little Width are perfect.
- EQ: Set the first band to Peak, with Freq 2400 Hz, Sharp Q at 50%, and a big boost of Gain at 13 dB. Set the second band to LPF with Freq 5000 Hz and Q at 40%. This really brings home the vintage vibe, losing some high end and bringing out this sort-of radio-esque mid-highs
- Compressor: Squeeze it. Set Threshold to -30 dB, Gain to 4 dB.
Note: the patch settings may slightly differ in the Syntorial challenge.
Notes And Observations
Pad Notes (From bottom to top for each chord)
- C Eb F Ab (3 times)
- C Eb G
- C Eb G Bb
- Eb G Bb C (6 times)
- F Ab C Eb (3 times)
- Bb Db F Ab (2 times)
- Ab C Eb G (6 times)
Explore More
- Home “Resonance” Breakdown | Synth Ctrl
- Recreating the main synth in Resonance Home using Xfer Serum (Youtube)
- How to Make Nostalgic Synthwave in VITAL // Sound Design Tutorial (Youtube)
Preset Downloads
Don't want to learn synth programming now? Use our synth preset as your starting point and tweak it from there. Register an account with Audible Genius and download the presets for free for the following synths:
- Serum
Comments
This recipe is the result of a Syntorial community preset remake request. Need support remaking this sound? Have comments?
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