The Synths of Take On Me

[Pickelhaube909]

It has long been debated as to what synths actually went into Take On Me, especially the lead. There are previous threads going into it all, but it is mostly speculation from users who haven't actually tried to recreate the song. I have been trying to recreate it for over three years now off and on, and at this time, I believe that I have one of the most accurate recreations out there, if not the most. While I don't think I am 100% accurate in what I think is all used, I am reasonably certain and can back it up with how much time I've put into it and how close my recreation sounds. So, what was (probably) actually used?

---

Lead (layered):
-JUNO-60 Plucked saw
-JUNO-60 Strings
-PPG Wave Bell
-PPG Wave Pad (maybe)

Strings:
-JUNO-60 Strings
-PPG Wave Pad
-JUNO-60 Pluck (maybe)
-PPG Wave Plucked (maybe)

Strings (bridge):
-JUNO-60 Strings (lowpassed)
-JUNO-60 Brass (lowpassed)

Bass:
-DX7 ROM 3A 12. E.BASS 1 (the same as ROM 1A 15. BASS 1)

Flute:
-DX7 ROM 2B 2. FLUTE 2

Plucky glissando reverb thing:
-DX7 ROM 1A 23. KOTO

Bell/brass arp:
-DX7 ROM 4A 27. COWBELL (maybe)
-DX7 ROM 4A 10. BRASS BC (maybe)

Other plingy effects:
-DX7 (For sure a DX7, but I have not found the exact patches yet.)

Saw melody at the end:
-JUNO-60 Chorus saw (Similar to 58. PWM Chorus)

Acoustic guitar:
-Gibson acoustic (no idea further than this, I am not a guitar expert)

Drums:
-LinnDrum (Kick, snare, rim, tom)
-DX7 ROM 4B 15. B.DRM-SNAR

---

Ending notes: Again, I do not know everything about the song for certain, but I want to say a few things and clear up a few misconceptions:

-I was able to pull this much info out from trial and error, random findings, and having the full multitrack to analyze.

-Didn't know Take On Me had a tom? Me neither, until I was transcribing the drum patterns. It is played a whopping one time, and at measure 119. That's at about 2:47 in the song.

-There is no DX7 in the lead. Get real.

-Many of the other synths often mentioned are not present in this "final" version of Take On Me. They were present in demo versions and in other a-ha songs, but not this one. This includes things like the CMI, Prophet, Jupiter-8, and don't even get me started on the Synclavier. It is said that a Synclavier was used for sequencing, and in no way did it use its own sound generation for the song.

-Just because a member of a-ha says a certain synth was used does not 100% confirm it. There have been cases where people have asked and it was misinterpreted/misremembered by the member or the asker, leading to the wrong instrument being assumed as "definitely part of Take On Me", but if you dig into it, you can hear that it is certainly not the case. I do not blame a-ha for this, as it is certainly hard to remember the tiny details of something you did almost 40 years ago. I can hardly remember what I had for dinner last night.

-I do not wish to sound cocky or anything, but I have likely been working on reverse engineering this one song for longer than anyone on these forums, or possibly on Earth. At least the publicly viewable data would suggest so. It just bugs me when someone tries to definitively state that a certain instrument is used for 'x' when they haven't a drop of experience trying to recreate the song. That is why I'm making my best educated guesses public for this topic, in order to try and stop the misinformation.

-What am I using in terms of plugins?

• JUNO-60: TAL-U-NO-LX V2

• PPG Wave: PPG Wave 3.V & WaveSimD

• DX7: Dexed (From a real DX7 owner, this seems to be the most accurate emulation out there)

• LinnDrum: Some sample pack I found somewhere.

-I plan on releasing an FL Studio project file for the song once I'm confident in it being accurate enough. I am not a fan of people who make a song recreation and keep it entirely to themselves, so I'm not going to be one of those people. I will probably upload the project file eventually as a reply to this thread, or here if I can edit the main post later down the line.

[desmond]

-I do not wish to sound cocky or anything, but I have likely been working on reverse engineering this one song for longer than anyone on these forums, or possibly on Earth.

You may think that, but you'd be wrong.

I just haven't published mine yet, which was due to be the first in my "Sound Diving" series, I more or less finished it in January of this year, but it got delayed while I was waiting on some details from other people, then it got put off a bit due to other commitments.

I will be publishing mine in my blog series though - it goes *very* deep - it's about 10,000 words at this point, but you have some details that match with my findings, and I have answers to some of your questions with a lot of painstaking research. You are right there is a lot of misinformation about certain records, including this one, and that's one of the things my series is also trying to clear up and definitively solve, where possible.

I just published my first blog post in this series this week on West End Girls to give you an idea of the kinds of thing I am doing:
http://www.muzines.co.uk/blog/sound-div ... d-girls/43

Anyway, by posting this here, you're sort of forcing my hand at publishing now before I was quite ready, so I need to think about what I'm going to do, as I was supposed to be working on another classic track this week...

[Pickelhaube909]

You may think that, but you'd be wrong.

I just haven't published mine yet,

Figured someone out there doing it in secret, but there was just no way for me to know. Even if there are many people sitting on perfect recreations in silence, this will be the most accurate one to have a publicly released project file.

[desmond]

Figured someone out there doing it in secret, but there was just no way for me to know.

Sure! Me neither...

Even if there are many people sitting on perfect recreations in silence, this will be the most accurate one to have a publicly released project file.

I'll be interested in what you come up with... (I mean the audio, not so much in the FruityLoops project.)
As you're quite confidently claiming super-accuracy, I'll be interested to see what you do for one sound in particular...

For me, as I've often stated before I'm less interested in making a "perfect" recreation (which is impossible anyway), what I'm interested in is the path in finding out the elements, and why they work, and recreating them to understand them, and documenting them with examples.

It's *never* possible to recreate something 100% - not even the original guys with the original gear now could recreate the original 100% - however accurate you get, there's always a whole new level of detail to get into. I mean the notes, and many of the sounds, are often reasonably easy to get (I say that, but you won't believe some of the research rat holes I've gone down on this!) but there's a lot more that goes into a production than the notes and the raw sounds.

Anyway, just wanted to declare my interest in this in case someone claims I ripped off my hard-won information from elsewhere, because I also put a ton of work into this...!

[Pickelhaube909]

I'll be interested in what you come up with... (I mean the audio, not so much in the FruityLoops project.)
As you're quite confidently claiming super-accuracy, I'll be interested to see what you do for one sound in particular...

...The intro glissando thing? I've been putting that aside so far as I work on things like the lead.

It's *never* possible to recreate something 100% - not even the original guys with the original gear now could recreate the original 100% - however accurate you get, there's always a whole new level of detail to get into. I mean the notes, and many of the sounds, are often reasonably easy to get (I say that, but you won't believe some of the research rat holes I've gone down on this!) but there's a lot more that goes into a production than the notes and the raw sounds.

Yeah, good luck trying to perfectly cancel out something like chorus...

[desmond]

...The intro glissando thing? I've been putting that aside so far as I work on things like the lead.

The thing is, I know the path you've gone down, so I know where the pain points are...

The things where you are just dealing with presets are usually fairly easy, like DX7 stuff etc - where you're dealing with eg analog synths, we don't have the original settings of the sounds used, so all you can *ever* do is come up with approximations that are in the ballpark and are doing the right thing, but you'll never get the exact sound - and for me, getting the exact sound in these cases is never the point of this exercise anyway - you'd spend months tweaking and still never get there...

(Of course it's possible you might figure out stuff that I haven't, or might get closer than I have in places, so I welcome the extra brains looking at it. But for now I just need to finish and publish my work on it - we can always compare notes later on.)

So - our aims are similar, in that we want to uncover as much of the information from the song as possible, but our goals are different - you want to provide a decent recreation that people can play with, and I'm not particularly interested in saying "Here's my version of the song". I'm more interested in documenting why I love it, and breaking it down to understand why it makes me feel that way...

[Pickelhaube909]

The things where you are just dealing with presets are usually fairly easy, like DX7 stuff etc - where you're dealing with eg analog synths, we don't have the original settings of the sounds used, so all you can *ever* do is come up with approximations that are in the ballpark and are doing the right thing, but you'll never get the exact sound

Well... depending on the analog sound, you can at least get close enough to hear phasing when inverting the waveform against the original. At that point, even if it's not cancelling out much, 99% of the people listening will know no better than to think it's the real, original synth.

The DX7 is the easiest part because most sounds in songs ever used are from the carts, since programming the thing by hand (especially in the 80s) was too much of a pain.

[desmond]

Well... depending on the analog sound, you can at least get close enough to hear phasing when inverting the waveform against the original. At that point, even if it's not cancelling out much, 99% of the people listening will know no better than to think it's the real, original synth.

Sure, like I say, you can get various degrees of in the ballpark, and never get 100% there, but you can always get closer... But if you have a good ear and synth knowledge, ballpark is usually plenty good enough, and exactly where that ballpark ends up being depends on how obsessive you are about getting there!

The DX7 is the easiest part because most sounds in songs ever used are from the carts, since programming the thing by hand (especially in the 80s) was too much of a pain.

Indeed! Like I say, those are usually (usually, not always!) fairly straightforward...

[desmond]

My blog post is finally up on Take On Me, if you want to see what I discovered along my process, and hear my mockup of an all-original reduced arrangement (not intended to be 1:1 of the final mix, as it's next to impossible to recreate someone else's mix/master from scratch).

http://muzines.co.uk/blog/sound-diving-2-take-on-me/40

(Warning, it's a long read!)

[philip]

It has long been debated as to what synths actually went into Take On Me, especially the lead. There are previous threads going into it all, but it is mostly speculation from users who haven't actually tried to recreate the song. I have been trying to recreate it for over three years now off and on, and at this time, I believe that I have one of the most accurate recreations out there, if not the most. While I don't think I am 100% accurate in what I think is all used, I am reasonably certain and can back it up with how much time I've put into it and how close my recreation sounds. So, what was (probably) actually used?

---

Lead (layered):
-JUNO-60 Plucked saw
-JUNO-60 Strings
-PPG Wave Bell
-PPG Wave Pad (maybe)

Strings:
-JUNO-60 Strings
-PPG Wave Pad
-JUNO-60 Pluck (maybe)
-PPG Wave Plucked (maybe)

Strings (bridge):
-JUNO-60 Strings (lowpassed)
-JUNO-60 Brass (lowpassed)

Bass:
-DX7 ROM 3A 12. E.BASS 1 (the same as ROM 1A 15. BASS 1)

Flute:
-DX7 ROM 2B 2. FLUTE 2

Plucky glissando reverb thing:
-DX7 ROM 1A 23. KOTO

Bell/brass arp:
-DX7 ROM 4A 27. COWBELL (maybe)
-DX7 ROM 4A 10. BRASS BC (maybe)

Other plingy effects:
-DX7 (For sure a DX7, but I have not found the exact patches yet.)

Saw melody at the end:
-JUNO-60 Chorus saw (Similar to 58. PWM Chorus)

Acoustic guitar:
-Gibson acoustic (no idea further than this, I am not a guitar expert)

Drums:
-LinnDrum (Kick, snare, rim, tom)
-DX7 ROM 4B 15. B.DRM-SNAR

---

Ending notes: Again, I do not know everything about the song for certain, but I want to say a few things and clear up a few misconceptions:

-I was able to pull this much info out from trial and error, random findings, and having the full multitrack to analyze.

-Didn't know Take On Me had a tom? Me neither, until I was transcribing the drum patterns. It is played a whopping one time, and at measure 119. That's at about 2:47 in the song.

-There is no DX7 in the lead. Get real.

-Many of the other synths often mentioned are not present in this "final" version of Take On Me. They were present in demo versions and in other a-ha songs, but not this one. This includes things like the CMI, Prophet, Jupiter-8, and don't even get me started on the Synclavier. It is said that a Synclavier was used for sequencing, and in no way did it use its own sound generation for the song.

-Just because a member of a-ha says a certain synth was used does not 100% confirm it. There have been cases where people have asked and it was misinterpreted/misremembered by the member or the asker, leading to the wrong instrument being assumed as "definitely part of Take On Me", but if you dig into it, you can hear that it is certainly not the case. I do not blame a-ha for this, as it is certainly hard to remember the tiny details of something you did almost 40 years ago. I can hardly remember what I had for dinner last night.

-I do not wish to sound cocky or anything, but I have likely been working on reverse engineering this one song for longer than anyone on these forums, or possibly on Earth. At least the publicly viewable data would suggest so. It just bugs me when someone tries to definitively state that a certain instrument is used for 'x' when they haven't a drop of experience trying to recreate the song. That is why I'm making my best educated guesses public for this topic, in order to try and stop the misinformation.

-What am I using in terms of plugins?

• JUNO-60: TAL-U-NO-LX V2

• PPG Wave: PPG Wave 3.V & WaveSimD

• DX7: Dexed (From a real DX7 owner, this seems to be the most accurate emulation out there)

• LinnDrum: Some sample pack I found somewhere.

-I plan on releasing an FL Studio project file for the song once I'm confident in it being accurate enough. I am not a fan of people who make a song recreation and keep it entirely to themselves, so I'm not going to be one of those people. I will probably upload the project file eventually as a reply to this thread, or here if I can edit the main post later down the line.

Magne said, they used P5 for pads on this one

[desmond]

Magne said, they used P5 for pads on this one

Which would have been pretty hard, given there was no Prophet 5 used on the session.
Read my blog, or the SOS article referenced from it. We know what was used.

They used different synths on different sessions - they recorded this song at least five times. But the version that was the final record, we know what was used, and it wasn't a Prophet 5, sorry.

[philip]

Magne said, they used P5 for pads on this one

Which would have been pretty hard, given there was no Prophet 5 used on the session.
Read my blog, or the SOS article referenced from it. We know what was used.

They used different synths on different sessions - they recorded this song at least five times. But the version that was the final record, we know what was used, and it wasn't a Prophet 5, sorry.

Lol, u r a funny guy. I won't argue,keep living in your fantasies)

[desmond]

Lol, u r a funny guy. I won't argue,keep living in your fantasies)

I'm not funny, I'm just (to the best of my knowledge, based on actually doing the research) correct. Try educating yourself with the actual facts, by doing the research, like I did.

Then come back with your well researched, backed up and cited source facts, and I'll be happy to discuss them.

Until then, you have someone saying he used a Prophet 5 on Take On Me (either you spoke to Mags directly, or heard it from some random other forum on the internet). Guess what - they used a Fairlight on Take On Me (at least one version, possibly two), and probably a bunch of other instruments too, with a bunch of different producers. But none of those are on the final version that became the record, which is the only version I'm concerned with.

If you can't be bothered to check my pretty well-researched blog post, then at least educate yourself here, from the producer and the engineer on that exact session that resulted in the final 1985 record:

https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/ha-take-me

All of my findings examining the multitrack backs up everything in that article.

If you have any extra evidence that can show me I'm not correct, I'd be happy to consider it.

[madtheory]

Genuine question, can Pickelhaube909 or philip actually demonstrate their synth patches, like desmond has?

Evidence FTW.

[ppg_wavecomputer]

Why does it matter, particularly when this question has been discussed multiple times on this forum (and elsewhere)?

Of course it's only me but I for one don't get it why people keep asking questions like "what synth on...?" -- seems to have become a habit here lately.

Stpehen