Recreating James Blake’s “The Wilhelm Scream” with Arturia’s V Collection

Prophet user James Blake is always near to our hearts and our playlists.

So when I first heard that Arturia’s V Collection was coming to Splice, my first thought was to remake the iconic synth pad sound from “The Wilhelm Scream” using the Prophet V, Arturia’s emulation of Dave Smith’s classic instrument.

Follow along with our video tutorial, where we walk through how we produced our recreation step-by-step:

This patch demonstrates the power of filter envelopes in subtractive synthesis – it’s quite a simple patch, but one that’s full of expression and character. I began with a big, bright saw with plenty of harmonic content, and then dialed down the Prophet V’s creamy low-pass filter to around 120 Hz.

This patch’s most recognizable characteristic is the plucky attack of the filter envelope. The Prophet V uses semitones for the envelope amount parameter, as opposed to a 100% depth knob. This makes it easy to create harmonically coherent modulations without having to do the math – neat.

Interested in giving the Prophet V (and more) a try? Get access to all 24 of V Collection’s synths for $24.99/mo on Rent-to-Own.

May 15, 2019

Max Rewak Max Rewak is a record producer, audio engineer, and music writer, based in New York and currently working in Sounds content at Splice.