How Mac DeMarco Created One More Love Song

One More Love Song is the fourth single from Mac DeMarco’s third studio album, This Old Dog, released in 2017. It’s a ballad built around a jazzy chord progression, opening with a charming synth hook that returns after each chorus, using a synth sound that also appeared on Another One. There’s also some dramatic piano in the chorus, which is fairly unusual for a Mac DeMarco song.

DeMarco recently surprised fans by releasing four albums, Dog on the Rock, Seven Off the Two, Seaplane Dog, and The View From Tian Tian, on streaming for the first time, having originally handed them out as CD-Rs on tour. It felt like a good excuse to go back and cover one of his older songs. The instrumentation in One More Love Song is typically sparse: synth, guitar, piano, bass and drums. Here’s the full remake.

The synth preset comes from my Juno Jazz pack, released in 2020, a collection of 80 presets for TAL-U-NO-LX and Arturia Jun-6 V built around the woozy, lo-fi synth sounds of artists like Mac DeMarco, Homeshake, and Men I Trust. I don’t actually know what synth DeMarco used on this track, though he’s used a Juno both live and on other songs before.

For this remake I used the MD One More Love Song preset, which mixes pulse and sawtooth waves with the sub oscillator turned up to maximum. The real character of the sound comes from the filter, though. It’s set quite low, around 3, with resonance at 2 and envelope amount at 2.5, which on its own gives a dark, plucky tone.

An LFO causes the filter to slowly open and close over time. In my patch, I set the Filter LFO fader to about halfway (5) with a very slow LFO rate of 0.93 Hz. The LFO in this patch works against the envelope. Because the LFO modulation is stronger than the envelope modulation, sometimes the envelope wins and you get a plucky attack, and sometimes the LFO is on its way up and you get a brassier, almost wah-like opening instead.

Below you can hear the synth with and without the LFO modulation.

In the chorus, the piano comes in playing dramatic seventh chords, finishing each phrase with a slowly ascending Am arpeggio motif.

For my remake, I used the Grand Piano Equal Mellow Solo patch from Ableton’s official Grand Piano pack. It’s a stereo preset with the low notes panned left and the high notes panned right, as though you’re sitting at the piano yourself.
I wanted more of a single mic’d sound instead, so I added an instance of Ableton’s Utility device and set the channel mode to left, leaving only the left-hand channel.

For the guitar I used the UAD Brigade Chorus plugin for a swirling retro chorus effect, followed by Valhalla VintageVerb for a lot of short reverb: decay set to 0.9 seconds with a fairly high mix of 35%. To keep things from sounding too wide and modern I lowered the stereo width down to 20% afterward, pulling back some of the width the chorus and reverb had added.

The bass guitar on One More Love Song is very simple and super dead-sounding. I used a low-pass filter set at 400 Hz to strip out most of the high end, though you’d get similar results from rolling down the tone knob on your bass guitar before recording. The only other effect I used is Ableton’s compressor to even out the dynamics.

The drums in my remake were built in Ableton’s Drum Rack using samples from a variety of packs, with the toms coming from Circles Audio’s Dead Vol. 1 pack.

Mac DeMarco would have recorded live drums for the original, so to help my sampled kit feel a bit more cohesive, I added Valhalla VintageVerb using the Lively Snare Room preset, a small, intimate room setting, with the mix set to a relatively high 18%.

There’s also an atmospheric percussion hit on beat 4 throughout the song. For this I used the Rap Noise sample from my own DrumVerse R8 sample pack, an industrial-sounding sample from the Electronic expansion card.

To get it closer to the sound in One More Love Song, I layered the sample with Ableton’s Chord device, set to -4 and +12 semitones, then set Sampler’s filter to 8 kHz and added a large reverb from Valhalla VintageVerb.