Let’s look at creating organ and piano sounds for our tracks – two staples of the deep house genre
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Organs and pianos are two of the best loved sounds in dance music, and continue to remain popular in the music of today. Producers like MK, Marshall Jefferson, Liquid, Kerri Chandler, Todd Terry, Masters at Work and countless more created hits crafted with piano as a leading element.
Contemporary artists like D.O.D., ESSEL, Huxley, Weiss, LP Giobbi and David Penn, also produce tracks focusing on the piano house sound. From underground house and techno records to award winning pop anthems, pianos and organs continue to be fundamental components of timeless tracks. A key factor in creating a successful piano track is the quality of the chords, and the production techniques used to process the sounds.
Retro sounding piano and organ house tracks are often paired with vocals, and a great way to make a unique track is to use some AI-generated vocals. In this month’s tutorials, you’ll learn how to make an organ house groove and add AI vocals, and how we created a house progression using Mixed in Keys’ Captain Chords Epic.
Sara Simms
Sara Simms is an acclaimed DJ and producer from Toronto who’s played some of the world’s most prestigious venues and festivals alongside artists like Carl Craig, Victor Ruiz and more. She owns her own record label, Simmetry Sounds which releases cutting-edge techno and house tracks crafted by the next generation of electronic music producers
> Step by step 1. How to make an organ house track with AI vocals
1 Start by setting the BPM in your DAW to 124. Choose a big kick drum, one that’s both full and deep. The kick drum level should be set at around -5 or -6 dB. Select a few simple percussion loops, including a hi-hat top loop, an open hi-hat, and a clap and add them into your session.
2 Create a blank eight-bar MIDI pattern, add a synth (we’re going with Omnisphere 2) and program in a note on the root note in the key of your track. Find a warm pad sound. For us in Omnisphere, we’ve gone with the Hybrid Warm String Section preset. Freeze the track and create a new blank audio track. Press Command and drag the frozen track to a new audio track.
3 For the organ bass, we add Korg’s M1 and select M1 House Split. Next, we make a blank MIDI pattern and create a simple bassline that plays in between the kick drum hits, on the offbeats. Program a musical idea that repeats for the first three bars, and changes on the fourth. Add groove to the organ by varying the length of the notes.
4 Next we’ll use Moises, an AI app that you can try for free to add vocals. Find vocals in the key of your track from an existing song. Use Moises (moises.ai) and upload the track by clicking track separation/new. Once done, export the voc
