Mild High Club is the psychedelic project of Alex Brettin, based originally from Chicago and now Los Angeles. The latest album, 2016’s Skiptracing, oozes with 60’s pop influences and spaced-out guitars and keyboards, as well as a confident musicality. In interviews, Brettin has mentioned having formal music tuition, which likely informs his musicality, and he seems to use whatever equipment he has to hand, with many elements of his sound coming from unconventional use of effects and sonic experimentation.

Homage

I’ll start with Homage, which features detuned synth chords and a gliding synth lead that weaves in and out of the chord changes. Both parts sound like they were recorded with a DCO-synth, so I’ll use TAL U-NO-LX to recreate them, starting with the chords patch. The key elements are a square wave and some detuning of the pitch when a note or chord is played. In TAL U-NO-LX, turn off the saw and sub oscillators and turn on the square oscillator. Bring down the filter frequency to 4 and raise the envelope amount (ENV) to 3. This creates the basic sound, but we’ll take it a step further down the psychedelic route and add some pitch detune. Raise the LFO amount under the DCO section to around 2, which will control the amount of detune, and then set the LFO trigger mode to key, which triggers the LFO when a key is pressed, causing the pitch to dip.