Deep House Production Tips Part 1 – Deep House Tutorials

Deep House Production Tips Part 1

Hey Deep House Fans,

Here’s part one of a 2 part series for Deep House production tips to get your juices flowing in the studio.

1. A lot of Deep House’s vibe comes from its rhythm. While the drum patterns don’t generally deviate much from the 4/4 template, leaving them straight makes them sound too robotic. To give them a more human feel – à la Chris Brann’s Ananda Project – you can apply 16th-note swing quantisation or some more sophisticated groove quantisation if your sequencer supports it. Analysing live drum breaks will give you a more human feel than straight quantisation, though you’ll probably find that keeping the kicks dead on the beat works best.

Deep House Production Tips Part 1

2. While programming riffs and chord progressions with a mouse is convenient if you can’t play the keyboard – and handy for tricky stuff, of course – you should at least give the old-fashioned live approach a try. Mistakes can always be corrected later using your sequencer’s MIDI editor, and you might be surprised at how much better your sequences sound when you’ve played rather than programmed them. Plenty of top producers swear by the ‘human touch’ to inject a bit of life and soul into their tracks.

Deep House Production Tips Part 1

3. A very commonly used sound in Deep House music is the electric piano. While it’s possible to spend hundreds of pounds on a commercial electric piano emulation, there are some superb free plug-ins out there that are more than capable of doing the job.

Deep House Production Tips Part 1

4. If you want to create an authentic electric piano sound, it’s crucial that you use the right effects. An Auto-Filter effect in particular can be used to add movement and feeling to an electric piano sound. Add an autofilter and turn the LFO Rate up to around 1.5Hz. Then add delay and reverb plug-ins in that order. Play with the wet/dry level of the reverb to make everything sound more intimate.

Deep House Production Tips Part 1

5. If your chords don’t have enough body, you can make them bigger by doubling them with another instrument. Even if the part you double it with is extremely quiet (you don’t want it to overpower the original chords), it can still add character and definition.

Deep House Production Tips Part 1

6. You need to ensure that you’re properly utilising space in the stereo image when you’re creating deep house, and a stereo imaging plug-in can make this a lot easier. Try turning the width value up to 200% for an extra wide stereo image that’ll give your tracks a widescreen feel.

Deep House Production Tips Part 1

7. Another thing to is to turn the width down to 0%. This will ‘mono-fy’ the signal and enable you to place it precisely in the stereo panorama using your sequencer’s pan control. This can be useful when you want to accurately position percussion sounds in the stereo mix.

Deep House Production Tips Part 1

8. When using doubled parts in this manner, you can use the stereo space to create different feels. Try doubling the electric piano with something else, using a stereo imaging plugin to increase the stereo spread of the electric piano and mono-fying the other patch. This will keep the electric piano vibes rolling around the stereo field while retaining a lot of definition in the centre of the mix.

Deep House Production Tips Part 1

9. Effects are generally used quite sparsely in Deep House, so those that you do use need to be up to scratch or they’ll stick out like sore thumbs. Reverbs, then delays are the most commonly used.

Deep House Production Tips Part 1

10. If you’re using reverb or delay send effects on sounds that have a large amount of low end, you can curtail the amount of bass output from the send effect by adding a high-pass filter at any point of the effect chain.

Deep House Production Tips Part 1

11. When you’re using a lot of percussion sounds, you can find more space to squeeze sounds into the mix by panning their stereo positions – if you pan all your drum sounds dead centre they can become one indistinguishable mass.

Deep House Production Tips Part 1

**Lacking some effects? You’ll find an ever-growing selection of quality free plugins here 

Original source: http://www.musicradar.com/tuition/tech/22-deep-house-production-tips-153784

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