Create an Impressive Sounding House Chord

House is a genre of electronic music that needs no introduction. Over the past decades, it spread widely and gave birth to some timeless hits. One of the genre's trademarks is the smooth synth chord generated by famous synthesizers like Jupiter 8 by Roland. The following tutorial will show you how to create an impressive-sounding House chord easily.  

Learn How to Produce a House Chord

For this tutorial, we have chosen to make a House chord sound in VST called Diva by U-he. Nevertheless, there are many virtual synthesizers out there that you can use to do the same. Let's start by placing an instance of Diva on a freshly made MIDI channel within SoundBridge: DAW.  

The first step in creating the desired sound would be to enter the preset menu. Then, under the "TEMPLATES" folder, choose the "INIT-Jupe 8" preset. This will give us a clean start. You probably have noticed the "MASTER" knob on the top of Diva's interface. We will pull it down to, let's say, 40 to get some headroom. The next important step would be to switch the voice circuit mode from "Poly" to "Legato," found at the bottom of the interface. This way, we can only play one note at a time.  

Tweaking the Oscillators

After the initial settings, it is time to move to the actual making of the sound. We will start this process by creating an essential patch offset between two oscillators. We will tune the VCO 2 detune setting to 3 to make the 3rd interval.  

 

This is how our basic House chord sounds so far.  

~House Chord 1  

Returning to the oscillator section, we see a 4-way switch mode to "BOTH." This switch assigns the pitch modulation section for each oscillator. By setting it to "BOTH," we are putting both oscillators to be modulated by the same source. Staying with the oscillator section, we will click on the little arrow above envelope 2 (ENV 2) and select the "STACKINDEX" mode from the dropdown menu. By doing this, we can modulate the pitch of individual stack layers. By increasing the "STACK" knob to +7, we detune the three layers by seven semitones producing a rich suspended chord. Now, we are getting somewhere. Let's listen to the progress of our sound again.  

~House Chord 2  

To smooth the sound, let's move to the filter section. In the filter section, we will pull down the "CUTOFF" and increase the "RES" a bit. Furthermore, we will tune the "ENV 2" knob up to approximately 20% to add some filter attacks sent to the envelope. Next, we will move to the ADSR section of the filter and tweak the attack and decay sliders a bit. Finally, let's increase the velocity slider. This will shorten the envelope, and velocity will react more to the filter. Let's hear the progress again.  

 

~House Chord 3  

Adding Stereo

To finalize our sound, we will add a bit more stereo width by tweaking the "AMPLIFIER-PAN" section. We will change the pan mode assignment from the initial "LFO 2" to "STACKINDEX" and finally turn the "PANMOD" knob up to 100. Ultimately, we will increase the "GLIDE" to get smoother transitions between notes. Having set all these parameters, we can say that we have a decent-sounding House chord. So, let's hear a short sequence followed by some rhythm and bassline.  

~House Chord 4 + Rhythm and Bassline