RICH CHORDS & Sampling

LUSH CHORD

Here we are going to look at how we can achieve a beautiful harmonically rich chord suited to deep house music.
We first will choose the C Maj scale, all the white keys or you can follow the cheat to find out a major scale in semitones - 2-2-1-2-2-2-1.

We want a harmonically rich chord so we will be using all of the possible keys in order to achieve this. We first start with the basic C Maj triad, C - E - G and we keep adding untill we get back to our root note which is C, so the notes we have are C - E - G - B - D - F - A.
If we play this you can hear it is quite high up in the scale so we will use inversions and octave doubling to get the sounds we want.

I have played a Rhodes emulation with a chorus for this example.

With the Velocities set we can now start to alter some of these notes by bringing down some of the upper ones we can make a nice lush deep chord.

I decided to leave the note of B3 out as I felt it was too much.

SAMPLING 

We now want to sample this chord, to do this we can consolidate the track so we are left with the wave form, we then want to put this into a sampler only as shown below. 

The sample is a little too quiet for my liking so we can normalize the volume by right clicking and then pressing normalize volume, this will bring the peak volume up to or as close to 0dB as possible. 
If we now play the chord we have a perfectly tuned lush chord that we can use for our track.

We can now play any key on the key board this keeps the chord within the C maj scale, but this still works outside the scale as you can hear in the example above.

​See how we can take this further and add that 90's flavor grit in the post Degrading Our Sampled Sound.

DL