Everybody wants to rule the world: keyboard sound

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A blast from the 80s. Tears for Fears, Everybody wants to rule the world. What a great groove.
How do I get that keyboard sound? All I know is it's an electric piano with plenty of sustain?
What is the best instrument to make that sound.

I have a Yamaha MODX and Ableton 12 with Diva and Serum. Is it possible to get close with those tools?
 
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A blast from the 80s. Tears for Fears, Everybody wants to rule the world. What a great groove.
How do I get that keyboard sound? All I know is it's an electric piano with plenty of sustain?
What is the best instrument to make that sound.

I have a Yamaha MODX and Ableton 12 with Diva and Serum. Is it possible to get close with those tools?
I play this song every gig. I use a patch on the Kurzweil called "classic pad", which is a synth-based sound as opposed to an EP sound. Soundwise very close to the original. Here's the example:
 
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Thanks, that helps to narrow down the sound. I don't have a Kurzweil so I have to keep experimenting.
My memory of that song is a very wide electric piano, but when I play the original song it sounds very different from what I remember. There are a lot of complex sounds in there.

In Ableton I combined a Diva sound with an Ableton Rhodes, an Air Mini Grand, and a DX7 VST.
After an hour of experimenting and those 4 sounds together, now I have something close but no cigar.
Like everything else, if you don't have it, it takes time to develop it. The sound that made it a hit is very hard to reproduce.
 

happyrat1

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Try a couple of sawtooth waveforms, ring modulation and a touch of LPF resonance. Layer with a Rhodes and a smidgen of plate reverb.
 
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gearspace.com has a lot of discussions of how to recreate these type of patches
 
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Hi, Intro and Choruses: 2 sounds, a brassy sawtooth over an EP pad with a long sustain.
During the verses it drops the brassy sound and just the EP pad.
Then the Fairlight vocal sample for the solo and the opening arpeggio, most synths these days have something close enough.
Cheers
 
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what everyone has failed to mention regarding this song, although it is written in the key of D, it plays a bit sharper than that on the record but not all the way to Eb, just inbetween the two.
 
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If you're playing with youtube vidoes that are pitched slightly different (not an uncommon practice in the 1980s), there is a Chrome plugin called Transpose which will let you put it right on pitch.
 
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what everyone has failed to mention regarding this song, although it is written in the key of D, it plays a bit sharper than that on the record but not all the way to Eb, just inbetween the two.
I suspected that. After combining a couple of sounds, I played along and with the original and it sounded terrible.
And I noticed that the sound changes after the intro. Why is it always so complicated.
 

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