I saw in a video of the swedish house mafia making of one that they said they used different instruments playing different melodys to make up the chords, can someone explain to me how to go about this, like do you have to have all of the parts hitting on the same note but playing different melodies and also each time a note hits making sure it is making a chord between the three parts for example? bit confused
I’m not exactly sure what you’re talking about here, man. There’s no difference whether you’re using one instrument to play three notes in a chord, or three instruments all playing one note. A G major is G-B-D, no matter how many different instruments are playing those notes.
BUT
Keep the root note in the lowest instrument. It helps keep the harmony clear.
I vaguely remember that they first played chords with only 2 notes of the chords. Gradually they added the 3rd note of the chords, but this time with a different sound.
And eventually they made bigger chords in the breaks. So from Warbread’s example chord Gm (G-B-D) they made Gm7 (G-B-D-#F)
the reason I was asking is because it sounded more like they may have used one instrument to play, for example the g one to play the b and one to play the d therefore three different instruments used to create the chord, the reason they were talking about doing this is because they were able to have so many layers without the track getting messy I guess by every instrument play the entire chord for example, I was hoping phil may have been able to clear up whether that is the way they went about it or if they mean something different as I read somewhere him talking about the same technique in another track someone posted but didnt really go into much detail of explaining what he ment…
Hopefully that made a little bit of sense
I see what you’re saying, and this technique is always used throughout house.
Generally you have 3 parts in a house track. Lead, mid and bass. The lead is the clear harmony that you hear in say “One”. This generally has a huge saw sound like in one for example. Then the mid section harmonizes the lead. So each note in the mid section forms 2 note chord with the lead. This is generally with a different synth to create the effect of a chord without being blatantly obvious.
Lastly you have the bass which completes the chord. This is also created with another synth. So all together you have a 3 note chord on every stab which sound really cool. It ensures that everything fits melodically and rhytmically without being too crowded either.
Obviously you can use more than 3 note chords, but thats the basic prinicple.
I hope that helped!
thanks for the reply I actually did know about the normal basic structure of a house actually think they did something a bit different in One i think I have managed to work it out now but thanks for the reply’s guys appreciate it
[quote]nathan_robinson13 (04/12/2011)[hr]thanks for the reply I actually did know about the normal basic structure of a house actually think they did something a bit different in One i think I have managed to work it out now but thanks for the reply’s guys appreciate it[/quote]
So what conclusion did you come to?