A trance anthem that goes for the jugular and just hammers a screaming riff home for a good eight minutes. We’ve heard that this is a standard preset on the Access Virus, but if you haven’t got one handy, try using a soft synth with a dual filter structure such as Massive.

Listen: Darude - Sandstorm

How to get the sound

We’ve used two oscillators for this recreation. Start with a poly saw wave, or equivalent, and feed that into filter one. Select a band-pass filter and set the bandwidth to wide. This is the equivalent to a 12dB setting on a VA. Crank up the resonance quite high so it creates a nice overtone.

Now you need to set the cutoff so that it sits at a nice sympathetic harmonic and brings out the tone of the note. It’s easier to pick out the exact frequency with the help of some distortion in the effects chain, so insert one of those into the signal path. Finally, if you listen closely, there is also another small amount of FM style crunch in the mix, which helps sharpen it up. We’ve used the additive wave on oscillator two set to three octaves down, modulated with the Mod Oscillator set to 48 semitones. Route this to filter two set to low-pass and medium res and cutoff.