Mac DeMarco is a Canadian musician known for his brand of old-school-influenced indie music, using a chorused guitar sound, simple arrangements and a varispeed tape sound. After utilising synths for Salad Days’ Chamber of Reflection, synths took on a much bigger role for the 2017 album This Old Dog, with several synth-only tracks. Mac’s main synth to use on recordings is his Roland Juno-60, with a Yamaha DX7 also showing up on several songs and the music video to Another One. In this article, I’ll break down the synths on my five favourite Mac DeMarco songs, and show you how to recreate the sounds in software synthesizers. The main synth I’ll use is TAL U-NO-LX, and all the patches are available as a free download at the end of the article.

Some other great resources for finding out more about Mac’s gear and recording techniques are the Pepperoni Playboy documentary, his Tape Op ‘Varispeed and Beyond’ interview, and the Mac DeMarco Nerds Out About Music Gear video by Reverb.com.

Chamber of Reflection

Chamber of Reflection stands out on Salad Days as the only song that replaces Mac’s signature chorused guitar with swirling layers of synthesizers. The melody and chords are interpolated from the Shigeo Sekito song The Word II, reworked with vintage synths. The lead synth was likely recorded on Mac’s Roland Juno-60, a vintage synth with a highly recognisable chorus sound. The patch can be created in TAL-U-NO-LX, a fantastic and inexpensive software emulation of the Juno synths.

From the default setting, turn on the square wave DCO and reduce the sub-oscillator volume to halfway. Raise the HPF filter to halfway, which will filter out some of the bass-end frequencies. Set the main VCF filter’s frequency fader to 6 and resonance to 4, which will filter out some of the high-end, but still leave plenty of high-mids. To create some movement in the patch, set the filter’s env fader (envelope modulation) to 2 and set the VCA switch to env, which will set both the filter and the volume to be controlled by the ADSR envelope. Set the decay fader to 7, sustain to 0 and release to 5.5.

For the pitch vibrato, set the oscillator’s LFO fader (at the top-left) to 1.3. This controls the amount of pitch modulation, and finding the sweet spot is the key for many patches. To set the vibrato speed, set the rate fader in the LFO section to 1.24 Hz with a delay time of 0.23. Lastly, turn on the Chorus I effect to complete the sound.