The SOPHIE & PC Music Sound: All The Plugins You Need to Emulate That Hyperpop Aesthetic
SOPHIE's production didn't sound like anything else. As one of the original hyperpop architects, she explored textures and sonorities in a genuinely disorienting, physically strange way. The first time most people heard Lemonade or Bipp, they couldn't quite understand it. Was it pop? Club? Art? It was metallic and alive, bright enough to hurt, with bass that felt geological and percussion that hit like a spring being released. It sounded like someone had built a world out of materials that don't exist: hyperreal latex, pressurized glass, chrome that bends. Understanding that sound means rethinking what synthesis is for. SOPHIE wasn't trying to emulate acoustic instruments or even vintage synths. She was simulating physics — the way materials deform, bounce, and resonate. Once you understand that, the toolkit starts to make sense. This guide walks through her documented instruments and workflow, the synthesis principles underneath the aesthetic, and the plugins that get you closest to that world today. The PC Music ecosystem — A.G. Cook, Danny L Harle, Hannah Diamond — shares a lot of this DNA, so much of what follows applies there too.
The Hardware Foundation: The Monomachine and What It Meant
Elektron Monomachine SFX-60+
SOPHIE's central instrument — the one she described in interviews as "clay on a turntable" — was the Elektron Monomachine SFX-60+, a digital synthesizer from the early 2000s. This context matters: the Monomachine runs 12-bit converters, which gives its output a specific character. Not lo-fi exactly, but cold. Slightly clinical. Plasticky in the best possible way.
Her workflow was to sequence the Monomachine, sculpt sounds in real time by tweaking knobs as it played, and then record the audio into Ableton for further layering and processing. The machine was a sketchpad, not a final destination. The two engines she leaned on most were the FM+ engine — an FM synthesis mode that produces metallic, rubbery, overtone-rich plucks — and the GND-SIN (ground sine), which generates pure, massive sub-bass tones with almost no harmonic content above the fundamental.
The result is something you can hear clearly once you know what to listen for: her basses are pure, not woolly. Her plucks are metallic, not warm. Everything has edges.
For producers today, the Monomachine is discontinued and expensive. The closest software replacements are Plogue Chipsynth OPS7, which models the cold digital FM character of that era's DACs with real precision, and the Elektron Digitone, the modern hardware successor — though SOPHIE herself famously stayed loyal to the original machine.
Synthesis: The "Material" Logic Behind the Sound
Before diving into specific VSTs, it's worth dwelling on the idea at the center of SOPHIE's sound design, because it shapes every decision. She wasn't thinking in terms of oscillators and filters — she was thinking in terms of materials and physics.
In interviews she talked about the "texture" of sounds, their "density," whether they were "stretchy" or "hard." This points directly to physical modeling synthesis: a mathematical approach to sound where you define the behavior of a virtual object — its mass, stiffness, and how it's struck — rather than shaping raw waveforms directly.
Physical Modeling
The physical modeling approach runs through everything she made. You hear it in the clanging metallics of Ponyboy, the springy plucks of Bipp, the way percussion sounds like it's being struck rather than triggered. The key parameters are the mallet (what's doing the striking — its hardness, speed) and the resonator (the material being struck — its stiffness, size, decay characteristics). For a SOPHIE-adjacent sound, you want resonators set to hard materials: glass, metal, tight membranes. Not wood. Not string. Metal.
VST options:
AAS Chromaphone 3 — probably the most flexible physical modeling synth available, with excellent control over mallet and resonator parameters. Essential for metallic clangs, tuned percussion, and rubbery impacts.
Ableton Collision — built into Ableton, underrated, and capable of excellent metallic and glass-like sounds with minimal setup.
The Latex / Pitch Envelope Trick
One of the most mimicked elements of SOPHIE's palette is what producers call the "latex" or "rubber" effect — sounds that seem to stretch and snap. This is achieved through extreme pitch modulation with very fast envelopes. Apply a pitch envelope to a simple sine or triangle wave with a decay of somewhere between 5ms and 50ms, a high initial pitch, and a steep fall. The result is a "pop" or "thwack" with the physical quality of something elastic releasing tension. Combine this with a fast amplitude envelope and you get those elastic transient shapes she used everywhere. This works in basically any synth with pitch envelope control: Serum, Massive X, even Ableton's Operator.
Comb Filtering
SOPHIE's metallic pluck sounds often use comb filtering — a technique where a delayed, slightly pitch-shifted copy of a signal is mixed back with itself, creating peaks and troughs in the frequency spectrum that track pitch. In Serum, routing audio through the comb filter with high resonance produces a ringing, metallic zing that responds to MIDI notes. This is how you get those elastic, twanging, almost harp-like synthetic plucks that don't sound like any real instrument.
FM Synthesis
FM (frequency modulation) synthesis is where you get the rubbery, glassy, attack-heavy sounds that define much of her palette. An FM synth creates timbre by having one oscillator (the "modulator") modulate the pitch of another (the "carrier"), producing complex harmonic relationships that shift dramatically based on the modulation ratio. High modulation indices produce metallic, inharmonic sounds. This is the engine underneath the Monomachine's character.
VST options:
Native Instruments FM8 — deep, slightly dark FM character.
Ableton Operator — surprisingly capable of SOPHIE-adjacent FM textures if you push the modulation ratios into dissonant territory.
Arturia DX7 V — for the classic Yamaha DX7 FM palette, which overlaps with parts of her sound.
For more options, click here to read our post about the best FM synth plugins.
Software: The VSTs That Shaped Her Sound
Native Instruments Razor
Razor is an additive synthesis plugin — meaning it builds sounds from stacked sine waves rather than subtracting from a rich waveform. This produces a different quality than subtractive synthesis: sounds feel built up rather than carved out. There's a crystalline sheen to it, a brightness that sits at very high frequencies without becoming harsh in a conventional way.
SOPHIE favored Razor for that metallic, glassy top-end presence — the kind of shimmer that makes a sound feel hyper-real and expensive. It's also capable of extreme spectral morphing, which she used to animate sounds in ways that feel almost alive.
How to use it: Start with a bright additive patch, add heavy harmonic distortion in Razor's FX chain, and modulate the spectral content with an LFO. Keep the attack very sharp.
Xfer Serum
Serum shows up in her workflow for its flexibility — particularly wavetable manipulation and the comb filter mentioned above. Serum lets you draw custom wavetables or import audio as a wavetable, which aligns with SOPHIE's interest in using any texture as a source material. The modulation system is also extremely visual and fast to work with, which matters for the complex pitch and filter movements her sounds require.
Key Serum techniques for this style: wavetable morphing with an LFO mapped to wavetable position, comb filter in the FX chain at high resonance, and liberal use of the built-in distortion to add grit to otherwise clean digital tones.
Ableton Live as an Instrument
Like many modern beat auteurs, SOPHIE treated Ableton not as a container but as an active participant in her sound design. Heavy automation of filters, pitch, and effects; resampling intermediate audio and processing it further; and using native devices like Corpus (a convolution-based physical modeling device) and Operator as central tools rather than fallbacks. If you're working in Ableton, don't overlook the built-in toolkit — Corpus in particular can produce metallic resonances that feel very much in her world.
Processing & Mixing: The Rules That Built the Sound
Extreme Compression: OTT and Upward Compression
The PC Music aesthetic is partly defined by a specific compression character: upward compression, which boosts quiet sounds rather than just clamping loud ones. The result is a mix where everything feels present simultaneously, where quieter harmonics get pulled forward, and the overall texture becomes almost hyperactive.
Xfer OTT (Over The Top) is the go-to here — it's a multiband upward compressor that A.G. Cook, Danny L Harle, and the broader PC Music camp use extensively. Apply it on synths, on buses, sometimes lightly on the master. It's the plugin most responsible for that pressed, hyper-saturated quality where everything feels simultaneously too much and perfect.
Dryness as a Choice
SOPHIE's sounds are almost never dripping in reverb. This is counterintuitive for producers trained on lush, spatial aesthetics — but her approach was to treat space as pressurized, not open. When reverb appears, it's short (under 500ms), metallic, and room-like — more like the inside of a box than a hall. This dryness is what makes her sounds feel so immediate and physical, as if they exist right in front of you rather than somewhere in a fog.
If you use reverb, try a very short plate or a metallic room. Pull the wet signal low. Let the dry transient dominate.
The Air Band: Hyper-Bright Top End
One of the most recognizable characteristics of SOPHIE-adjacent production is the extreme brightness at very high frequencies — a crystalline quality above 15kHz that makes the mix feel like it's made of glass. This isn't achieved by boosting standard high-frequency EQ bands; it comes from a specialized "air band" boost at 20kHz or even 40kHz.
The Mäag EQ4 is the classic tool for this, with a dedicated Air Band shelf that reaches up to 40kHz. Boosting this band adds presence and sheen without adding harshness in the audible range — it lifts a layer above everything else and makes the whole mix feel more vivid. You can approximate this in other EQs (FabFilter Pro-Q's high shelf pushed to 20kHz+), but the Mäag is the go-to for producers chasing this specific quality.
Synthesized Drums, Sharp Transients
SOPHIE's percussion wasn't sampled — it was designed. This distinction matters for how her drums feel. Synthesized drums have a perfectly precise transient relationship to the pitch and body of the sound; nothing is borrowed from a recording that brings its own room and frequency quirks. Everything is under control.
The result is hits that feel exactly aligned, with transients sharp enough to cut through heavy processing. When making drums in her style: pitched sine wave kicks with fast pitch envelopes (the latex trick applied to bass frequencies), metallic snares built from noise and tuned resonance, hi-hats from filtered white noise or FM synthesis. Nothing organic. Nothing borrowed.
Distortion and Texture: OhmForce Ohmicide
For tracks with more aggression — Ponyboy is the clearest example — multiband distortion creates "ripping" textures that maintain clarity across the frequency range even as they shred. OhmForce Ohmicide is the specific tool associated with this aesthetic: a multiband distortion with individual character per band, capable of creating distorted sounds that feel purposeful and controlled rather than blown out.
Modern alternatives: FabFilter Saturn 2 (multiband saturation with excellent per-band control) and Soundtoys Decapitator for more character-driven saturation.
Check our post about the best saturation and distortion plugins here
High-Pass Everything
To maintain that hollow, plastic space where synths can breathe, SOPHIE high-passed almost everything except the sub-bass. This keeps the low-mids clear and lets each element occupy defined frequency space without accumulation. If a sound isn't providing low-frequency content intentionally, roll it off.
The Bigger Picture: What SOPHIE Was Actually Doing
One thing the existing documentation on SOPHIE captures but undersells: her process wasn't about finding the right preset or the right plugin. She described software synthesis as giving producers "the possibility to generate any texture in theory" — and she meant it as a challenge, not a comfort. The Monomachine was a tool for sculpting sound in real time. Serum and Razor were tools for building textures that couldn't exist in the physical world.
The PC Music aesthetic more broadly — developed alongside A.G. Cook, with Danny L Harle, EASYFUN, and others — shares this orientation. It's pop music made from impossible materials. The voice processing is too perfect, the transients too sharp, the compression too aggressive, the brightness too bright. The whole aesthetic is built on excess precision rather than organic looseness.
So the path to this sound isn't just about loading the right plugins. It's about developing a different instinct: toward harder materials, tighter envelopes, drier spaces, sharper edges. Use reverb sparingly and metallically. Make your drums from scratch. Push your EQ higher than feels reasonable. Layer physical modeling with FM to get textures that feel both artificial and viscerally physical at once.
That tension — between something that sounds completely synthetic and something that hits you with the force of a real object — is what made SOPHIE's music unlike anything else. And it's still the target.
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