How to recreate the Doctor Who theme

Mike Bedford makes use an analogue synthesiser simulator to generate one of TV’s most iconic and recognisable themes.

- Mike Bedford

Established in 1958, the Radiophonic Workshop was created, according to the BBC, to produce incidental sounds and new music for radio and television. It was known for its pioneering work in electronic music and music technology.

Just two years into the Workshop’s existence, Delia Derbyshire, who had recently graduated from Cambridge with a degree in music and mathematics, joined the BBC as a trainee assistant studio manager. Within a couple of years she’d been assigned to the Radiophonic Workshop. It was here that she famously produced the Doctor Who theme tune, which had been composed by Ron Grainer.

Delia had to use a mix of equipment including laboratory instruments like signal generators, in-house designed and built electronic circuits, and reel-to-reel tape recorders. Bizarrely, Delia even used metal panels, specifically blanking plates from 19-inch instrument racks, plucked by hand, to create the twang of the Doctor Who baseline. To produce different notes, the sound was recorded on a tape recorder and played back at different speeds to alter the frequency, and further electronically manipulated to subtly alter the fundamental sound.

Introducing amSynth

We’ll be using a real-time open-source software synthesiser called amSynth, which is similar to classic analogue synthesisers of the 1970s, including the Minimoog and the Roland Juno-60. First install it on your PC and fire it up. Now click the Audition button towards the right-hand edge of the toolbar (which is a green forward-pointing arrow in some versions) and you’ll hear a musical note. What’s more, just by chance, unless they’ve been changed since the version we used, the default settings produce a sound that isn’t a million miles from what we need for the bass line of the opening few bars of the