Tyler, The Creator Synth Sounds | Reverb Machine (2024)

Tyler, the Creator, real name Tyler Gregory Okonma, is a rapper and producer with a unique, alternative take on hip-hop. Tyler produces all the music on his releases, and he has also co-produced on releases by Frank Ocean, Earl Sweatshirt and Mac Miller. His style incorporates samples less than his peers, and he frequently uses synthesizers and electric pianos to accompany his unique, often aggressive vocal delivery.

A photo of Tyler’s room posted on his Instagram page in 2015 shows a Roland Juno-6, JX-8P and Microkorg in his collection; he has also mentioned owning a Yamaha DX7 in a 2018 interview. He is a co-founder of the alternative hip-hop collective Odd Future, and he also creates album covers and merchandise designs.

In this article, I’ll recreate some of Tyler’s sounds from his newest release, 2017’s Flower Boy. I’ll use the software synth TAL U-NO-LX, an emulation of the Roland Juno, and several plugins from the Arturia V Collection and share the patches at the end of the article.

I got like a Juno, a Roland, I got a bunch of random stuff at home that I’ll pull out when needed. Like, one day I just went on the internet and took any random keyboard and didn’t want to look it up because I’d rather be surprised. I bought a DX7 and didn’t get the right cartridge, so I just had a bunch of random sounds but they ended up working out really well. I used a lot of those keyboards on the last album and it gave me sounds that I’ve never had. Some of those sounds, as cheap as they are, they’re just so rich because they have so much texture and personality. – Tyler, the Creator

Flower Boy’s album opener, Foreword, is built around a harmonically minimalistic sample and some jazzy synth chord sequence, a motif that continues throughout the album. The synth patch is rich mix of sawtooth and square waves run through a chorus effect and can be recreated easily in Arturia Prophet V. Load up the template preset Pro5 2 Osc and lower the frequency tuning of one of the oscillators by 12 semitones, or an octave.

Turn on the square waveforms in both oscillators and set their PW knobs to 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock to thin them out. In the filter section, set both the cutoff knob and the envelope amount to halfway, and raise the attack time to 300ms, creating a soft fade on the filter. Raise the resonance knob slightly and add some chorus from Prophet V’s built-in chorus effect with the wet/dry knob at 50%. Save the patch and use it to play jazzy chords for instant Flower Boy vibes!

The bass in the video comes from Arturia Mini V, and the beat is sampled from the Sonic Youth mix of Spoon, by Can.

Boredom is built around another jazzy chord progression played on an electronic piano, and some retro-style synth leads that could’ve come from one of Tyler’s Roland synths. To create the electric piano patch in your DAW, fire up Arturia Stage-73, a software emulation of the Fender Rhodes, and find the preset Smooth Jazz to use as a starting point.

You can greatly affect the electric piano tone with velocity, so play your MIDI keys softly. You can also adjust the virtual amps settings to manipulate the tone, so try lowering the bass EQ and boosting the treble to get a brighter sound. I also ran the patch through XLN Audio’s RC-20 Retro Color to give the track some subtle vinyl character, although iZotope’s Vinyl plugin is a good free alternative.

For the lead synths, you can use TAL U-NO-LX to get some instant chorused Roland Juno character. The first lead is a super-simple sawtooth patch using some slight filter pluck with a quick attack. The second patch, that plays the longer melody lines, uses pulse-width modulation to create a rich string-like sound.

Turn on the squarewave oscillator and then simply set the PW fader to 7, with the mod source set to LFO, then set the LFO’s rate to the 3 mark, on free mode. Mixed with the sawtooth wave, this contains lots of harmonic and sounds very bright. You can see the rest of the settings to finish the patch in the video below! The beat in this song is sampled from The Montereys Get Down.

Glitter features a retro-sounding synth lead reminiscent of the Ohio Players much sampled Funky Worm. Firstly, the synth chords have a bright attack with a chorused sustain portion, and although this could be two parts layered, it’s also easy to create the effect in one patch. From TAL U-NO-LXs default patch, lower the sub volume to 2, set the HPF fader to 3 and the VCF’s cutoff to 5.

Turn on the chorus II effect and you have a basic Juno patch. To add the bright attack, simple raise both the envelope amount and decay faders to between 3 and 4. Use compression to smooth out the volume of the patch, and plenty of delay to give the patch a nice sense of ambience.

November opens with a warped sounding synth patch, that is reintroduced later in the song. The patch sounds complex but is easy to create using Prophet V’s advanced modulation capabilities. Start again with the Pro5 2 Osc template, find the Poly-Mod section (top-left), activate the filter button and turn the Osc B knob up to 50%. This simply routes the pitch of oscillator B to the filter cutoff as a modulation source, creating unusual sounding filter movement.

From here set the cutoff and envelope knobs to 10 o’clock and the resonance knob to 11 o’clock. Set the filter envelope’s attack time to 110ms and EQ out any low end below 300 Hz to clean up the patch.