Visage - Fade To Grey | Lead Synth Patch Remake

Remaking the lead synth from the 1980 song "Fade To Grey" by Visage can be an exciting challenge for any synthesizer enthusiast. Here’s how you can create the "Fade To Grey" lead patch and play this iconic sound on most hardware or software subtractive synthesizers (Serum, Vital, Pigments, Prophet, Korg, Moog, etc). We've included the preset download directly for your convenience, but we strongly recommend you use our programming tutorial to recreate it yourself.

Original Audio

The round, sweeping lead on Visage’s “Fade to Grey” arrives with a dramatic slow pitch bend at 1:10 and carries the song’s melancholic hook. Its timbre is a medium pulse wave rounded by a low-pass filter, with pitch LFO vibrato and expressive filter movement for brightness variations. The part sits prominently over the second verse/bridge and is played as a monophonic, portamento-enabled lead. Billy Currie performed the synth lead live and in studio using an ARP Odyssey.

Original Performing Instrument

ARP Odyssey

Our Remake of The Lead Synth sound

This audio clip is how close we've matched the original tone of the lead synth from the song "Fade To Grey" by Visage, giving you a reference point as you design your own synthesizer preset. Play it as often as you need to familiarize yourself with the nuances of the sound.

Synth Patch Programming Recipe

Getting Started

• Start by initializing your synthesizer to a plain saw with no filter, modulation or effects. For soft synths use the "init"/"default" preset or the the button to reset all parameters to their default factory values.
• No two synths are exactly alike, so treat the values below as approximate, and use your ear.
• Percentage values (e.g. 50%) represent the relative position of a knob or slider within its full range. The full range of each parameter may differ from synth to synth, so use your ear.

Note: the patch settings may slightly differ in the Syntorial challenge.

Explore More

• Fade to Grey (Visage song) – Wikipedia
• Vintage Synth Trumps with BILLY CURRIE – Electricity Club
• 10 great things about the ARP Odyssey – MusicRadar
• What Synths Were Used? – Fade to Grey – Visage – Gearspace
• Visage Fade To Grey ~ Vintage Synthesizer Recreation ~ RetroSound (YouTube)

Preset Downloads

Don't want to learn synth programming now? Use our synth preset as your starting point and tweak it from there. Register an account with Audible Genius and download the presets for free for the following synths:

• Primer, our free synthesizer VST