By Brandon Darby, 2025

https://mykingislight.bandcamp.com/album/lady-science-ep

This essential and classic track of nineties house music is favoured by many as the perfect nostalgic, deep and emotional track that has a special place in many sets. The evocative tones of the synths, the progressive arrangement that takes the listener on a journey and the sublime chord progressions and melodies make this track a forever classic that never sounds dated. Here is a breakdown using simple techniques of how you can create sounds just like this in your productions, which will provide you essential skills on sound design, music theory and creating atmosphere within your music.

Pads

The first sound to be demystified is the deep and organic pad sound featured in the intro and throughout the track, which provides the basis for the song and is a truly iconic sound in its own right. Below is an audio example of the sound from the original track:

And our recreation here:

This sound is fundamentally a basic two sawtooth oscillator filtered pad sound, utilising a bit of detuning on the two oscillators, a soft attack and long release, and chorus/reverb to finish it off. Many variations of this sound can be created through changing the oscillators, the detuning amount and by tweaking the filter settings.

Start by creating a blank patch on Ableton’s Analog synth, then turn on Osc1 and Osc2. Change the both shapes to a sawtooth and detune them both slightly in opposite directions. Also make sure both oscillators are sent to F1 (filter 1), you can copy the image here:

Next, we can move over to the filter section to get a good starting point for our sound. An LP24 filter, with a cutoff of around 297 and a resonance of 21% works great for this sound, these can of course be adjusted to taste. You can also now dial in a little envelope amount in the filter section, I chose 1.19, this will give the filter a bit of an opening whenever a note is pressed, and the shape of that opening determines the sound, and the shape is determined by the ADSR of this filter section. In the image below you can see how I have shaped this envelope here, it is not a stabby sound by any means, so we’re keeping it slow and soft.

By now, if we play a basic A minor chord, you should have something that sounds something like this:

Clearly, we are not quite there yet. What we need to do now is make this into what is typical of a “pad” and that is a soft sound with a soft attack, and plenty of release. We do this by shaping the “Amp1” envelope, as shown with my settings here:

Using these exact settings on the amp envelope, you will now have an A minor chord which sounds like this:

The sound is now getting more into deep pad territory, and we are not far off now. What we need to do to finish off this sound is add some effects and create a nice chord progression. What I would suggest now is if you are wanting to copy the chord progression of the original track, is to input these chords into your midi track as shown here:

The chord progression goes as follows over 8 bars (the notes in chord are in brackets):

1. E minor (E, G, B)
2. D6 (D, F#, A, B)
3. C major7 (C, E, G, B)
4. A minor9 (A, C, E, G, B)
5. A minor7 (A, C, E, G)
6. A minor7 (A, C, E, G)
7. A minor6 (A, C, E, F#)

As you can see in the image above, the chords follow a downwards motion, which adds a dramatic and melancholic emotional tone to the song, typical of a lot of nineties house music. If you were to make do these exact chords but take them upwards instead, it would give a feeling of rising and would have a different emotional tone. This is how the pad will now sound if you use this chord progression:

At this point, you can experiment with using these exact chords but in different orders (as in starting with the D6 and then going to the E minor etc, to create your own progression). You can also use different oscillators on the synths and play around with the filter to change the tone of the sound. To finish this sound off completely like the original, we can add a chorus effect and reverb, here are my two preferred setups which use the free TAL CHORUS LX plugin and the stock Ableton reverb:

We can use this chorus plugin inserted on the channel immediately after Analog. This will add width to the sound, make it sound more juicy, detuned and vintage. We can then add a return channel to our project, with a reverb and EQ in the chain. The EQ used after our reverb is there to get rid of any low frequencies in the sound of the pad reverb, because those frequencies are mostly muddy and boomy, what we really want is the airy high and natural mid range frequencies of the synth to be reverberated. It will also help when mixing your track to not have so many low frequencies reverberated.

One final finishing touch to clean up this pad is to go back to the Analog channel with our pad on, and insert an EQ after the chorus plugin, this also serves to clean up unwanted boomy low frequencies in our pad sound, and by doing it both on the reverb and on the synth channel, you are doubly making sure there are no boomy frequencies.

Now we can move onto our second sound, which is really a variation of the pad we just created. This will be a great example of how tweaking a few parameters can give you a new layer to use that will add flavour to the later parts of your track. Around the 3:00 mark in the original track, there is a higher pitched more lightweight pad which comes in to create an uplifting feeling. Here is that sound coming in, layered on top of our first pad:

As you can hear, it is a variation of the main pad and uses the exact same chord progression, so there is no need to come up with any new chords, just change the sound of the synth! In the image below, you can see how the fundamental characteristics of the synth stay the same, the same oscillators, the same type of filter etc. However, the filter envelope amount and the opening of the filter cutoff are different, this is what gives it its brighter sound.

We can use the same long reverb as before by sending this new channel to the same return channel and we can also use a copy of the same chorus plugin as before, or put the two sounds in a group, and use the plugins on the group to save CPU.

Bass

Let’s take a look at the bouncy and rubbery bass sound featured in this track. This again is quite a simple sound, yet works so well in this deep smooth track because of its soft character, it provides a solid foundation and doesn’t sound too aggressive.

Here is my recreation of this sound:

The first step in creating this sound is to load up another instance of Ableton’s Analog, but as with all of these sounds, you can apply the processes to any synths of your liking. We are only using Osc1 this time, because using two oscillators with a bass can sometimes make it more muddy and doesn’t always make the bass more powerful. We want to use a square wave here and can leave the “Detune” at 0.00.

Moving onto the filter, we want to use an LP24 filter shape, with the lowest cutoff your synth can do, and a small amount of resonance. What is key now is to dial in some filter envelope, I have chosen 4.59 on this synth. You then want to start shaping the filter envelope ADSR so you have a shape similar to below, which will make the sound plucky and bouncy, short and snappy. You can experiment now with varying degrees of both the filter cutoff amount and the filter envelope amount, also try some different resonance amounts to get extra juiciness!

Finally, moving onto the amp envelope like the pad before, we need to shape this ADSR to get the right sound for our bass. The shape we want is very similar to that of the filter envelope ADSR, with a faster attack and a quick slope after to keep it plucky. The release time can be altered to taste, depending on how quick and snappy you want your final sound.

Now the sound is really starting to take shape, there really aren’t many more steps, from this point onwards you could add some special effects like echo or chorus, but in the original track, it stays quite simple. Let’s take a brief look at the midi melody pattern for this bassline.

As you can see, the pattern is very simple, using only two notes: E and D. It follows a two bar pattern that repeats three times (blue), it then happens for a fourth time (red) with this last pattern having a very cool fill (green) at the end to finish the whole 8 bar pattern. This 8 bar pattern repeats for the whole track, showing that sometimes less is more.

Using this sound as a starting point you can take it much further by changing the oscillators, varying the melody and pattern more, and by adding effects!

Lead Synths

Let us now dissect the final iconic sounds of this track, the two lead sounds which play the memorable melody forming the identity of the track, they are both really great and unique sounds which again are very nostalgic and definitely add to the vibe in which the writers intended. Here are my recreations of the sounds:

And when you layer the two sounds, as in the original, you get a rich and special organic sound with lots of movement!

To begin with the first Lead layer, open up an instance of Wavetable, the perfect stock Ableton synth for creating pretty much any synth tone imaginable. For this sound we only need one oscillator, so you can turn off Osc 2. For Osc 1, go into the “Basics” and then “Basic Shapes” categories, and adjust the wave position percentage to around 12%. This will give us something in-between a sine wave and a triangle wave, as can be seen on the image below. We want this first layer to be gentle/ clean, which is why a sine or a triangle is perfect, because it doesn’t have a large amount of harmonics, like a saw or square.

Moving onto the filter section, our aim here is really to smooth out the sound by taking off some of the high frequencies and warming it up a touch, you could argue that by setting the wavetable position to 0% and selecting a pure sine wave with nothing to filter out, would get rid of the need to use a filter, but I prefer to use a filter to get the exact sound that I want, and you can also add resonance with a filter too.

You should now have a fairly basic clean sound which sounds something like this:

What we now want to do is shape the sound using the amp envelope ADSR. We want to soften the attack and get a touch of release. Using the final section in the Wavetable synth, we can change the lead sound to mono and introduce a bit of glide. Making it mono allows the sound to be cleaner and the notes not overlap and get mushy and the glide makes them pitch bend into each other slightly when the notes overlap, which is a really great way to get a smooth and fluid sound. Try exaggerating the glide and playing some notes overlapping with each other.

To finish off this sound, we simply need to send the channel to the same reverb as earlier, which will add a lovely atmosphere and help all of our synths blend well together into a cohesive atmospheric space. If we now take a look at the midi for this melody, you can see its simplistic brilliance. We of course use the notes in the key of the track and the notes that were in the chord progression earlier, but we arrange them into a melody that tells a story. As you can see visually, the melody has a theme, it goes up, then down, and that repeats until the last phrase of the melody, where it returns back to the centre (or starting point) again.

Listening to it with the kick and drums, you can get a feel for how the melody takes the listener on a journey over 8 bars.

Using this one synth lead layer would likely be enough for some productions, but to really take it to the next level, it would be useful to layer it. What follows is how you can create a second layer, which has a different tone, yet the same melodic theme.

Start again with an instance of Wavetable, this time however we will use two oscillators and like with our pad earlier, we can detune these two oscillators which will create a slight pitch difference between them both, resulting in a richer, thicker and more organic sound, perfect for a stand out lead synth. We have this time used the “Brds Dual Saw” from the vintage category, with the wavetable position at 0.0%.

Up to now, you’ll hear just a basic saw wave sound, but we can begin to shape the sound using the filter like below, and after this is where things start to get interesting.

For now, you should have something that sounds like this:

A nice enough sound, not too dissimilar to our pad from the start, but let’s take it further. Move over to the “Matrix” section of the synth, and set Filter1 Freq – Env2 to 11, then set Filter1 Freq – LFO1 to 10. The wavetable has many complicated modulation potentials, but put more simply this is using a filter envelope and an LFO to control the filter, like a generic synth does. So what we will have here is some opening of the filter in a brassy stab kind of way, and some movement of the filter gradually with the LFO. This creates a movement which sounds dynamic and fluid.

Once we have set this up in the matrix, move over to “Mod Sources” and set the amp envelope, envelope 2 and LFO 1 as shown in the images below:

Once you have used your reverb like before, you will get a sound just like the audio example of Lead 2 at the start of this section, full of movement and dynamics. Finally, it is just a case of layering these two sounds together, using the exact same melody and watching the richness unfold! Don’t forget, these techniques are not just limited to the style of nineties house music, use them to create your own sound!

Check out the full video tutorial for this article for subscribing members: https://app.synthohub.com/tutorial/139

Thanks for reading.