As modern as a neon sign illuminating the brushed steel hull of a DeLorean, synthwave is aglow with 80s artificiality. Here’s how to surf the synth wave…

Everything old is new again. Just this once, it’s appropriate to begin with a cliché. After all, synthwave as a genre is all about clichés snatched from PG-13 movie posters circa 1985.

As a consciously-considered (contrived?) genre, synthwave has only been around since the mid-2000s, but the music that inspired it has been around for 40 years. Created and consumed by a generation weened on equal parts Blade Runner, Battle Zone and Back to theFuture, synthwave owes everything to the aesthetic of the 80s.

So what is it? You’ve got it etched into your memory - the pulsing synth basses of a John Carpenter movie or Michael Boddicker’s gloriously goofy end titles for Buckaroo Banzai not to mention the low-rent electronic scores to dozens of straight-to-VHS sci-fiflicks.

And the games! Who isn’t inspired by the cacophony of electronic bleeps that accompanied the flickering glow of the local arcade - or better still, the action of a battered, well-played game cartridge?

Game composers like Chris Huelsbeck composed mini-epics for many an after-school afternoon, as kids hunkered down with their Commodore 64 or Amiga 500. Many of those kids would themselves become musicians, bringing their influences into the modern era.

Thanks to the current proliferation of cheap gear and an industry obsessed with all things vintage, synthwave seems... inevitable.

>Step by step 1. Building the backing tracks

1 The artists who created the music that inspired synthwave artists faced the limitations of the day - expensive gear with low polyphony and poor sync options, limited track counts and fidelity. Happily, we can make use of plugins to provide our sounds and compose, record, and mix our project in a free DAW such as Tracktion Waveform Free.

2 Here, we’ve created a new project with the default eight tracks. (We can add more.) We’ll start with that staple of the 80s, the arpeggiator. For this, we’ll bring in an instance of Dune CM. In Waveform, this is done by dragging the grey “+” widget down to the right-most section of the track. A menu tree appears, from which you can select the plugin.