Technique: Creating Deep House Chords from Scratch

Today we have a quick article outlining a great trick for deep house chords and pads. House producers use this technique quite a bit, but it could work for most genres of electronic music.

Let’s get into it!

Deep House Chords Start with a Sound

This is probably the most important part, as it will dictate how the end result will sound. Find a synth you like. It’s is incredibly subjective, so don’t worry about getting it “wrong.” A little tip though, pad sounds work terrifically with this technique Remember the golden rule of music: If it sounds good it is good.

Experiment here. Try layering pad sounds. Try manipulating or automating parameters like filters and envelopes. Try phasers, choruses, reverbs – the works. It doesn’t matter how CPU intensive your sound will be, you won’t actually be using the synth throughout the production process.

They Continue with a Chord

This is the part that gets tricky for those without some music theory under their belts. You need to play a chord with your synth. Technically, you can use single notes or multiple tuned oscillators, but playing a chord will thicken up the sound in a wonderfully musical way.

If you have some theory under your belt, you can experiment here. Basic chords – like triads and seventh chords – would work, but try some extensions to further color your sound. For those of you not so theory inclined, try using a 9^th chord. Ninth chords are very common in this genre of house music, with just a little extra color. You can construct a ninth chord by choosing a note and building it up by adding thirds . This means you take your major scale (1-2-3-4-5-6-7) and using every other note in the scale sequence (1-3-5-7). Following the pattern past the octave (8), you get your ninth (1-3-5-7-9).

Now, set your DAW to record your sound as audio – not MIDI. I know your synth track is probably MIDI unless you’re using a hardware polysynth, but this is easily done by setting a new audio track, set it to resample (this means recording the audio from the master track), and soloing your synth track. Hold out your chord for as long as you like, but a few bars should suffice. Now you have a sample that is ripe for manipulation.

They End with a Sample

Congratulations, you have a fully custom, original sound! The final step is probably the most fun step. Open a new MIDI track and drop in a sampler. In Ableton Live, Simpler works the best, as Sampler is a bit of an overkill. Drag your newly recorded sample into your sampler and voila – your chord is now playable with single notes on your keyboard.

This is important for house music because since it has always been based on samples, very often you have producers moving the same chord type up and down the keyboard. You could do this manually, by actually playing the chords, but that’s a headache for those of us who are not pianists.

Now take your chord sample and experiment on the keyboard. You will find that the end result is quite housey and very satisfying to work with.

There you have it – a method for creating your own original deep house chords.

Until next time,
Audiomunk