Mild High Club is an American psychedelic pop group, led by musician Alexander Brettin, who majored in jazz studies at Columbia College in Chicago and founded Mild High Club in 2013. He worked on Mild High Club's first album, Timeline, for almost three years until its release in 2015.

Both harmonic and melodic richness, and in between Synthesizers and guitars is a reassuring space where a “drunky” voice with a peculiar sound finishes giving a personal touch to its sound. I'm sure any fan of MacDemarco, Ariel Pink, Alex Calder, Men I Trust, or even Tame Impala will love Mild High Club.

I wanted to deconstruct the song 'Tesselation' from their second album Skiptracing, with a chord progression that I always have admired. Check out the performance video below, and read on for all the details on each instrument.

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The structure of the theme is as follows:

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MUSIC THEORY

I have had the pleasure of having once again the help of Rodrigo Arribas, a great fan of Mild High Club, to analyze the song harmoniously.

The first thing is to listen to the song and grasp where the feeling of rest is found. Looking at the chords of the verse, he points out that most of them are dominant. We only find rest in the Am chord, so it will be taken as the tonic degree of our tonality, A minor in this case.

Starting from this base, we identify all E chords as V degree, since E is the dominant of A.

Later, analyzing the Bb13 chord, we find that it has the same notes as E7(#9) except for the fundamental, and that it acts as a dominant substitute dominant for E7(#9). All tritonal surrogates or surrogate dominants are within a tritone or 3 tones distance of the dominant you want to replace. In this case, the official dominant of A is E, and in turn Bb is 3 tones away from E, so it is a substitute dominant or tritone sub.

On the other hand, B7 is a secondary dominant of E7, since B is the fifth degree or dominant of E, and E in turn is dominant of A. Therefore, it is the fifth degree of the fifth degree of the tonality or V7/V itself. An additional tension is created in this B7 chord that resolves to E7. In the music theory section of this article of Crumb you can find a graph on secondary dominants.

Afterwards, the Dº7 chord or also called Ddim7 (diminished) is like an E7 chord in disguise, since if you look at the notes that the Dº7 chord contains they are the same as E7, with the addition of an F which is the tension b9 of an E7. In this way, Dº7 could be classified as an E7(b9) or V7(b9).

Finally, the first chord is the bVI degree of Am. At first, it can mislead the note of the bass that has been chosen for the chord, since it does not matches none of the notes in your arpeggio (this is often called a hybrid chord), but if we take a look at the bass notes of the next two chords we discover that this note is part of a chromatic rise of the bass line to get to the note a (G - G# - A).

In general, you can see how the whole verse has a sense of constant tension that is barely resolved, as almost all the chords are dominant. Moving on to the chorus, that feeling of rest does come. The verse is in A minor, and the chorus modulates to the parallel Major key: A Major.

Here the analysis is simpler, except for the chords Gº7 and Fº7. These diminished chords usually have a dominant function with b9 tension, as we have already seen with the Dº7 of the verse, and you have to look at the next chord to understand what function they have. The Gº7 chord has the same notes as an F#7(b9) only without playing the F# note, and this F#7(b9) chord would therefore be the dominant of its next Bm chord, giving a feeling of rest and resolution. The same goes for Fº7, which is classified as a masked E7(b9), again V degree of its next A chord.

To assimilate all these concepts, I recommend reading it with a guitar or piano by hand to investigate the notes of all these chords and little by little understand the intervals and relationship that exist between them.

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SYNTHS

The leitmotiv of the song is an elaborate 8-chord harmony played with a Rhodes electric piano. To recreate it I have used two layers of the VST Stage-73, one covering the mid frequencies and another more focused on high frequencies with a faster punch. This higher-EQ first layer carries the following settings.

Check it out below.

Rhodes layer 1

While the lower layer has a similar sound passed through a Guitar Rig phaser effect to create a more moving background as it blends into the first layer.

Listen to this second layer below, and both layers at the same time.

Rhodes layer 2

Rhodes both layers

In the intro there is also a kind of organ that appears in fade in with a kind of tremolo, for which I have used the VST B-3 by Arturia for organ sounds and the Tremolator by Soundtoys with the following settings.

Listen to this organ and how it blends with the rest of the instruments.

Organ intro with all instruments

Once the voice appears in the verse, all the instruments disappear except for an organ that begins by making third intervals to end in the full chords similar to the intro.

Again, the sound is an organ that I have recreated with the B-3 with the following configuration. In addition, I have passed it through a ring effect from Ableton himself to distort it and give it more aggressiveness, and through the tremolator for the final output. Check it out below.

Organ verse

After this first voice verse, the chorus begins. Among the keyboard layers here, we again find a standard church sound organ marking the descending harmonic base as follows.

Organ chorus

Next to it, I identify another panned keyboard on the left side of the stereo in the original song, with a sound that reminds me of Christmas. I have recreated it with 3 synthesizer layers, on the one hand the Synclavier and the Arturia DX7, and finally the Operator that Ableton brings himself. It's not an easily identifiable sound, so I've had to experiment blindly a bit to get close to something similar with the following settings.

Listen to each sound separately and all together at the end to see how they complement each other to form a denser and fuller sound.

Synclavier layer

DX7 layer

Operator layer

All synth layers

In the second voice verse, these same keyboards also appear, but this time removing the first layer of Synclavier and leaving only the DX7 and the Operator.

This has been the entire synth section. If you liked them, remember that you can download all the sounds and presets of this song by subscribing to my patreon, so that you can use them and experience yourself.

DRUMS

The drums of the original song have a dry and muted character, with very controlled hits, in the line of groups like Men I Trust (you can see another remake of this group here). In addition, it follows a relatively simple and constant rhythm, which makes things easier.

Of its sound, the most characteristic thing I have found is the snare, so the first thing I have done is choose a snare with a sound as similar as possible within Addictive Drums 2.

Once the snare was chosen, I added a soft-sounding kick drum and a hi-hat that moved through mid frequencies like the original song, rather than treble. Hear the result below.

Drum kit sound

Finally, to this I have added another layer of hi-hat and a shaker loop on top that gives an extra touch like the original song. Note that a kind of metal tambourine appears in the chorus. Listen to the passage from verse to chorus here.

Shaker + hi-hat extra sound

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BASS

The bass of this song has a höfner-style melodic character with a sound close to groups like Tame Impala or Men I Trust. It moves in mid frequencies, without abusing the bass or treble.

To recreate it I have used a höfner bass and I have passed it through a compressor and through the Guitar Rig 5 as an amp simulator to shape its EQ. Check it out below.

Bass sound

GUITAR

There are hardly any guitars in this song beyond the solo in the intro, and their appearances in the choruses, giving a lot of opening. It has a fairly jazzy and clean sound, which I have recreated using a compressor and the Guitar Rig 5 again with the following jazzy settings.

In the chorus the guitar makes an arpeggio using the highest 3 strings that complements beautifully with the harmony of the keyboards.

Guitar sound

At the end of the song, a guitar appears making the chords that previously only the piano did. This guitar has a kind of wah-wah like the original song that I recreated with an autofilter from the Guitar Rig itself. Listen to it here.

Guitar autofilter sound

As a personal note, I love playing the chords of the verse progression on the guitar because of the tensions and colors it has. If you need the tablature to play it, please ask me!

VOCALS

Finally, the voice of Alexander Brettin, lead singer of Mild High Club, is quite nasal, and has a quite relaxed character, with a psych-drunky touch.

I have recorded two vocal tracks and panned them slightly to each side of the stereo. Then, to each of them I have applied a chain of effects that I usually always use by default in the voices, and finally I have passed them through the Waves Supertap to play with the delay in stereo and the Waves TrueVerb to give it a bit of reverb and space. The result is this.

Vocals sound

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Honestly, this has been one of the most complete articles that I have done, I hope you liked it!

I want to end this article celebrating the first year since I started this space, thanking all the people who have supported this project, especially my patreon subscribers, and all those readers, I'm nothing without all of you.

Thank you, see you in the next one!

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