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Learning without distractions

How to make the strings and celesta sound for Wham! ‘Last Christmas’

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Wham – ‘Last Christmas’:
Merry Christmas everyone and a happy new year!

Yes we did get you a gift, and yes you guessed it, it’s a festive little DRC sound design tutorial featuring one of the greatest Christmas songs of all time; ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham!

If you write a good Christmas song, you can reap the rewards of the royalties for the rest of your life. That’s why so many artists try (and inevitably fail!) each year to create a future Christmas classic in the hope that it could be their possible retirement fund.

Last Christmas’ is rather unique for a Christmas single, in that the focus is on the love story narrative, rather than a generic list of holiday traditions loosely strung together in search of a quick buck by cashing in on Christmas.

It also holds a unique record of its own for the UK singles chart, where the battle for ‘Christmas Number 1’ is a hotly contested fight each year. Last Christmas is the biggest selling single ever in the UK charts which has never made it to number 1. In its original year of release of 1984, it was held off the top spot by the goliath of charity records, Bob Geldof and Midge Ure’s Band Aid single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ The story did have a happy ending though, as Wham! donated all of the profits from Last Christmas to the ethiopian famine appeal that Band Aid was promoting.

Join us this week as we unwrap the secrets of the strings and the celesta sounds, with your favourite analog emulation synth, DRC!

We still have your heart, George,
Team Imaginando