It’s been 40 years since Tears For Fears released their landmark second album Songs From The Big Chair, which is now considered a staple of 80s synth pop. It notably made prominent use of MIDI sequencing, which at the time was fresh technology.
To celebrate, Reverb Machine has meticulously recreated the band’s song Everybody Wants To Rule The World using modern software synths, with no sampling of the original hit. And it’s produced a complete tutorial of each element so you can recreate the track, too.
As Reverb Machine points out, the original song employed synths including the Yamaha DX7, PPG Wave 2.3, and Sequential Prophet T8. The system was controlled by UMI (Universal Musical Interface), a software-based MIDI sequencer running on the humble home computer, the BBC Micro.
The intro used the factory presets on either a DX7 or Yamaha’s DX1, both of which were pretty new synths at the time. Reverb Machine reaches for the Arturia emulation of the DX7, the DX7 V.
Reverb Machine recreated the electric guitar riff using a Les Paul on the neck pickup through a Roland JC-120 patch on a Kemper Profiler.
There’s also the sound of a choir, which was originally created with the sampler and workstation Fairlight CMI. It uses the samples OOHH1 and CHOIR6, which were put in separate tracks on the remake. The recreation used Arturia CMI V emualtion to recreate the same sounds.
The Arturia Prophet-V 5, a software emulation of the Prophet-5, was used to recreate the main synth part. Reverb Machine also identifies that the DX7 preset used was ROM1B 32-BASS 4. There’s also a PPG Wave layer that comes from a modified version of the 013 A preset, which was replicated with Waldorf’s PPG Wave 3 VST plugin.
As for the drum machines, Tears For Fears used the new Fairlight and Emulator samplers alongside as the sample-based drum machines that were also fresh onto the market at the time. For the remake, a DMX kick was layered with a LinnDrum kick, while the hi-hat and shaker sounds are classic LinnDrum sounds. In addition, there is the use of a snare sample from Zenhiser’s Classic 80’s Snares sample pack.
The reverb used was the Valhalla VintageVerb with the Small R-Hall preset, with the low cut tweaked to remove excessive bass.
You can take a look at a full – and impressively comprehensive – breakdown of Everybody Wants To Rule The World right now over at Reverb Machine.
