Design Your Deep House Lead

"Deep house" is a mellow, melodic house music subgenre. However, since its inception in the 1990s, Deep House has seen significant evolution within the electronic music scene. Most modern deep house tracks exhibit a prominent central theme that holds a prominent position within the musical arrangement. Bearing this in mind, I will show you how to design your deep house synth lead in the following tutorial. As usual, I have prepared a short sequence in our SoundBridge: DAW, which contains most of the entire mix of instruments. Let's hear it. ~Full Mix - Without Synth Lead

Create a Lead Melody Using an Appropriate Synth Instrument

Because this sound will be created from scratch, I'll launch a new instance of Vital on the new MIDI track within SoundBridge: DAW and get to work. This synth patch will be created using only one oscillator from Vital, but it will reach its full potential when the number of modulation parameters increases. I'll write a simple synth lead melody using Vital's init preset. Let's hear it. ~Deep House Lead - Init Preset To start working on our deep house lead sound, I'll increase the number of unison voices on the oscillator section to two and detune by 2%. Next, I'll go to the LFO 1 section and modulate the oscillator phase by selecting "Bend" from the dropdown menu. You'll notice in the audio example below that I've already added some movement to the sound. ~Deep House Lead - Osc Unison & Phase Modulation

Design Your Deep House Lead Using Filters and FX

Moving on, I'll go to the filter section. Following the adjustment of the initial cutoff, drive, and resonance value. Aside from that, proper envelope settings for this type of sound are required, so a slight increase in attack time followed by a shorter decay and increased release will suffice. I mentioned two sections because we will connect them by modulating the envelope with the filter's cutoff. ~Deep House Lead - Envelope to Filter Modulation Because I still want this sound to move, I'll go to the "Random 1" section below the LFO. This will be used to avoid constant modulation that always repeats in the same way. I'll modulate this again, but only slightly, so that the movement of the filter cutoff is always random. Another modulation that I intend to apply to this sound is pitch modulation. I'll create a modulation shape in the LFO 2 section and assign it to the pitch in the OSC section. Like before, I want the modulation to be subtle. ~Deep House Lead - Pitch & Filter Modulation The final step in creating and processing this sound is to polish it with effects. You can see that I used EQ, Chorus, Delay, and Reverb in the Vital Effects section. Let us hear the final result on its own and in the context of the whole mix. ~Deep House Lead - Final (Solo) ~Full Mix - With Deep House Lead

If you liked this article about sound design, here are some more on the same subject:

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• Use Vocals to Create a Buildup

• Make a Melodic Techno Drop FX

• Design Your Own 303 Sound From Scratch