PC Music Production Tips

This is the only correct way to do it.
In all honesty, though, I think it's a little counterintuitive to be looking for specific sounds that went into these sorts of tracks, especially when A.G. Cook explicitly stated that one of his favorite methods is to try and squeeze as much as he can out of terrible built-in presets. Does it really matter which particular bell sound was used, other than for the fun of trainspotting that goes with solving any PC Music-related mystery? And on the other end of the spectrum, unless you're willing to spring for an Elektron Monomachine and learn how to use its DigiPRO waveshaping functionality you're probably not going to replicate popping bubble sounds the way SOPHIE does.
More productive, I think, is to understand the principles behind the production methods. I think a primary one is that you need to be exacting in your design of a track, considering the effect of every choice you make and how it fits into the whole, but to always assess the effectiveness of these decisions based on your intuitions as a listener. This applies equally well to a track like "Broken Flowers", where there are layers upon layers of sounds ranging from percussive bell elements to slightly-detuned, barely perceptible pitch-shifted vocals at the midpoint, but they all fit together like the stock elements of a 90's house track; or "Bipp", where you can tell that everything you hear probably took hours on end of PITCH ENVELOPES EVERYWHERE but the effect upon listening is a sort of heady, thoughtless synesthesia (that subtly follows the outline of 80's latin freestyle, to boot). "Synesthesia" is a really operative word there - these tracks run on the careful manipulation of our instinct, including our instinctive associations between the senses. A lot of effort goes into making sure every element of the song - including ones external to its actual three-minute confines, like the artwork and title - are working towards the same effect. Even when there's a frisson, like with "Bronze", it's a very calculated one, and the point is ultimately to examine it. This emphasis on things not entirely in the realm of music theory - along with the resultant exclamations of "multimedia! sound design! hyperreality!" from diehards - probably accounts for a lot of the accusations of "superficiality", but it's also what really stands out to me as their great innovation. And, more than the mixed-media pop nostalgia or the Web 2.0 pages for every song, I think it's the part that's most revealing of their "post-internet" nature, and what we really need to take away from them as musicians if we want to follow in their footsteps: a PC Music song is considered, straight from the get-go, in terms of all the things surrounding it that it can expect the audience to be aware of, and it then plays extravagant games with that context.
So what advice would I give for making PC Music-ish music?

In terms of style: think about the pop songs you listened to as a child (which, without making too many assumptions, probably coincided closely with the PC Music members' own childhoods). Especially think of the ones that you sort of half-remembered, that stuck in your mind as representatives of certain styles and sounds, and that you were only able to fit to a specific context later on when you stumbled upon them by accident and went "oh, that one" (one of these moments, for me, came when I recently re-listened to a Sailor Moon tie-in CD for the American market that my parents got me for Christmas one year, and saw so many elements of my later taste in rough, unpolished form - galloping house piano lines, bright shiny girl-power choruses, sauntering, vaguely sinister New Jack Swing vamps). As that last anecdote shows it hardly has to be an immaculate example of the musical approach it represented - it's not like I fell out of love with "If" when I realized that I had always been subtly reminded of "I Want Someone To Love Me (Raw Re-Mix)" when I heard it. But it's the first encounter by which you evaluate all others - a building block of your musical vocabulary, if you will. Take stock of these signifiers and the roles they serve for you. This will allow you to see whatever track you're making in terms of the precise effect you want it to have, mix-and-matching your own experiences as a listener to create something new for others. Of course, once you understand the songs that serve as building blocks you can start building more elaborate "compounds", as it were (note SOPHIE's constant comparisons of his work to molecular gastronomy). Be a magpie, see what you like in everything around you and take it for yourself, recombining it in giddily excessive arrangements. The point is to make a song that can emerge from the safe nest of your production software with an awareness of the world around it and its place in that world, especially if it's going to be carving out a new place for itself.

In terms of production: Always keep in mind that not everybody listens to music with the knowledge of how it's made, but that they could start making it as easily as you. And that nothing I've said so far should invalidate the desire to know "what sound did [x] use in [y]?", as that's a vital part of forming your identity, and is additionally one of the effects PC Music strives very hard to create in people. You should desire their sounds. In electronic music, especially, where an identical sound can show up on track after track and the presence of a specific one can define a genre, these tools have a totemic power. You can say a lot about yourself, or evoke what's been said about others in terms of yourself, by use of these elements. But you should take care not to lose track of the difference between these sounds and what they evoke. Down that road lies hoovers, modern talking, even the dreaded Prydasnare (none of which, I should note, have lost their utility even for all their overexposure, and can even have new purposes found for them - see PC Music's rehabilitation of the airhorn). There's a massive world of content out there for you to piece your "sound" together from - and it needn't involve $100 sample packs. I've gotten a massive amount of mileage from Ableton's "Simpler" feature, designed for cutesy 80's Fairlight-style pitching up and down of audio on a piano roll. With this fairly meager bit of technology I can make bespoke sounds (including a charming little bell-ish noise I got by simply thwacking a glass that happened to be nearby with a Sharpie) or even evoke existing ones - by resampling the demonstration clips at Synthmania.com I've gotten access to the entire convoluted history of professional and non-professional synthesizers, including a particular sound I can't imagine my productions without that came from a meager little thing called the Casio Rapman. The point is, be novel with what you put into a track. If you don't have what you want immediately at hand, try an interesting workaround. You might be surprised. And don't stop shooting for that one sound you've always loved in that favorite song of yours, even if the path to it takes you to some places you didn't expect to go (when will the powers of Jam & Lewis be at my disposal?).

In summation - aim for some half-remembered ideal of the best song you ever heard, and shoot for it with all your might, but try not to be surprised when it comes out looking more like the inside of your head than what you were trying to imitate. That's as close to a definition of "the PC Music sound" as I think I can come.

P.S. This was probably the most I've ever written about PC Music that wasn't a slightly indignant defense of the label in the face of some post-breakout backlash, so, you know, thanks for reading. And being here to read, for that matter, you guys have been the sanest people on the internet when it comes to this amazing little thing that's happening to music.

a good demonstration of sophie's style is so examine the paired down versions of songs he professionally released later, like hey qt, and bipp. the melody, i can tell, is, along with the aesthetics, the most important part. he probably takes a great deal of time to make sure the right key and the right notes are chosen in his choruses, for instance, and builds off of that when he's 100% confident in it

yeah i liked tnght a lot more than lunice or hudson's solo stuff. wish they'd get back together

who is this mystery guest
and what could my secret admirer be up to
?

Yeah, the early PC Music stuff is not very complex in terms of production. It's a very post-modern approach, taking very common presets for well known genres of music and utilizing them in unique and unexpected ways. It's similar to how Oneohtrix Point Never for his album
'R Plus Seven' utilized sounds that were common with the Fairlight synthesizer, and very evocative of a certain era (The Fairlight was considered cutting edge a few decades ago, but now with the DX7 synth sounds 'dated' to most people) but ONP recontextualized these sounds to give them different meanings with how they're utilized.

PC Music has changed a little bit from its early inception though, the AG Cook productions for Hannah Diamond and Danny L Harle's recent releases have less of the 'homemade' quality of their earlier work. A lot of the productions AG Cook did early on utilized lots of cut up vocal sounds to layer in with the percussion to give the songs a certain rhythmic heft and also harkened back to the early to mid-80s where that technique was more common (for example Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis' productions for Janet Jackson used this a lot on her album 'Rhythm Nation').

So a lot of the PC Music 'sound' can be created with very common softsynths. I would highly doubt that a lot of it utilizes any analog gear, but I could be wrong. Analog gear generally is a little bit less sterile than the songs coming out of PC Music lately. I also don't think PC Music camp is using much of Arturia's softsynths for similar reasons.

But really questions like this one are difficult because once you're familiar with synthesis methods, the softsynths from the same category of synthesis will generally sound very similar to each other, the differences is just in the user interface. But there are different types of synthesis: Subtractive Synthesis, Frequency Modulation Synthesis, Wavetable Synthesis, Granular Synthesis, Physical Modeling Synthesis are some. A lot of the PC Music chords, basses, and leads all sound very much like Subtractive Synthesis.

If you're looking for software recommendations even a lot of the basic softsynths that come with Ableton will do the job. If you're looking for external ones Zebra from U-he or all the Rob Papen synths could potentially get you there.

I think the best thing is to not try to exactly emulate the PC Music sound directly, but write down a list of the elements of the music you admire, what sounds do you like the most and why. What exactly about this combination of sounds speaks to you and how does it make you feel. When you have this list, I think that's a better jumping off point instead of direct emulation of something that's already been done before.