BadBadNotGood are a Canadian instrumental band that combines jazz with electronica, and traditional instrumentation with psychedelic synth sounds. In 2016 they released IV, which BBC Radio 6 picked as their album of the year. The album finds the band using odd rhythms, jazz-influenced harmony, and long, dub-like delays, and they bring on several guest vocalists to accompany them.

For live performances, they use a Roland Juno-60 for synth lines and a Korg SV-1 for the electric piano tones. It’s likely the SV-1 provided most of the Rhodes, Wurlitzer, Clavinet and Organ sounds on IV. They have also used a Dave Smith Prophet 08 in the past for synths, though this seems to have been replaced by the Juno. Additionally, the album credits for IV list a variety of synths used, including the Juno-60, a Yamaha CS-80, a Korg Poly Six, and a Crumar electric organ. The CS-80 (or 60) might have been used more on the album and just not been toured with for being a vintage instrument. Although there are fantastic emulations of the CS-80 and the Poly Six, I’ll stick to TAL U-NO-LX for the recreations, because it’s easy to use, sounds great, and will keep the tutorial from being too plugin-heavy.

In live videos, you can see the keyboard player has a laptop as part of his setup, so it’s possible he uses plugin effects to process his synth sounds, particularly for reverb and delay. For all the examples below I’ve used PSP Old Timer for compression, and the Soundtoy plugins Echoboy for delay, Decapitator for saturation, Little Plate for reverb and Devil-Loc for distortion. However, you use any effects you like, and each will have a different flavour.