Patch Request: Depeche Mode - Never Let Me Down Again (Lead)

Fantastic, thanks very much Joe. Will see how this goes with Serum!

This one was trickier than I expected. I assume it would be easier with the synth that was actually used, as I found I really had to tweak the envelope curves, filter slope, etc. in Serum to get close.

Try this:

Osc 1: Saw. 4-voice Unison, no Spread, mild Detune to just smear the tone a bit.

Sub Osc: Saw, one octave below. The levels of the osc should be about the same.

Filter: LowPass, 12 dB. Cutoff around halfway, a little bit of Res, and hefty amount of Drive to get a nice saturated analog sound.

Filter Envelope: To create a bright spiky attack transient, bring the Sustain to 0, and set a short Decay and Release around 130 ms. Then turn up the mod amount so the sound starts at the brightest height of the filter. Then, I had to tweak the curves of the Decay and Release, dragging them upwards so that the sound hung out a little longer at the top end, accentuating the bright and buzzy attack transient before sweeping down to a round finish.

Amp Envelope: Bring the Sustain down about halfway, and then set the Decay to be pretty quick, around 260 ms. Then turn up the Main Volume. This will give you a nice loud and aggressive attack transient. Then increase the Release to create a tail, around 550 ms.

Reverb: This will obviously create an ambient space around the sound, as reverb always does. But it will also accentuate the bright attack transient, creating a smeared version of it in the reverb itself, sort of sounding like 3rd osc one octave higher. Go for a medium size, with 50/50 Wet/Dry. Increase the Low Cut to get rid of bottom bulk, and then turn up the Damp so that the beginning of the note creates a nice bright reverb wash for just a moment that quickly gets dampened down, much like the filter envelope.