Chromatics are a synthpop band from Portland; their signature sound combines nostalgic songwriting with their own take on Italian disco. The band’s producer, Johnny Jewel, uses mostly analog synthesizers, and is also a member of the projects Glass Candy, Symmetry and Desire, whose track Under Your Spell I covered in the Drive Synth Sounds article.

In this article I’ll look at the synth patches and mixing style that makes up Chromatics signature sound, with recreated versions of Shadow, the new single Toy, and Faded Now, which is a reworked version of Closer to Grey. The synth patches have been recreated in Arturia Mini V and Xfer Serum, and it’s also worth picking up iZotope’s free Ozone Imager 2, as Chromatics tend to use wide stereo sounds in their mixes.

Gear

There isn’t much information on exactly which synths Chromatics use on their recordings. The band seem to have a large collection of vintage synthesizers and likely use a variety of different synths on their tracks. They typically use a pair of Korg MiniKorg 700s for live shows and they also tend to showcase some of their keyboard collection in music videos, including:

Roland SH-2000 (Famous Monsters and You’re No Good)

Roland Jupiter-8 (Black Walls)

Roland RS-505 (Blue Girl)

Thomas Organ 2001 (Move a Mountain)

Maxikorg 800DV (used in The Taste of Blood)

Yamaha CS-15 (cover of The Taste of Blood)

Shadow

Shadow is one of the tracks from the still-unreleased Dear Tommy and was performed by the band in Twin Peaks: The Return. The track is dark and haunting, with a few layers of synths that leave plenty of space in the mix for the vocals. An interesting listen is the early 8-track demo of Shadow that Jewel shared on his SoundCloud page.

The synth strings in Shadow are very bright with lots of high-end. There are two layers, with both playing the melody in octaves at 1:11 and only the high layer playing the melody at 1:30. I recreated both layers using Arturia Mini V, a great sounding and relatively versatile monophonic synth. The lower layer isn’t too clear in the mix but could be an electric guitar with reverb and distortion effects. Another great synth for Chromatics style strings is Arturia Solina V, which doesn’t have a traditional synth filter, but can always be paired with a filter from the DAW.

To create the main high string layer in Arturia Mini V, use three detuned sawtooth waves all pitched to the same octave (4’ in Mini V). Set the filter cutoff to 640Hz with resonance set to 1.9, and turn off keyboard tracking. Turn on unison mode and set the voice detune knob to 0.15 to thicken up the sound considerably. The sound also has some stereo widening, and I used the free plugin iZotope Ozone Imager 2 with width set to 65% to widen the sound. The track is then run through a moderate amount of reverb from Valhalla VintageVerb and Shimmer.