Leads inside your House music production

When it comes to setting up the main leads within a complete house music production, one could use a very wide range of instruments to pick from. It also depends on the flavor, the style, or just simply think what just sounds good. This is probably going to be the hardest topic to go indepth about because I personally could write books if I would cover everything about leads in a complete house sequence. I will go through the basics about what kind of leads one could apply in some given situations. Other then that, I think you should probably use your own feeling to it. Maybe listen to a whole wide range of different house tracks and listen to it with the kind of 'investigating' set of ears. Each piece of music probably distincts itself by a couple of factors, the drumtrack, the basslines and the leads.

Just to give a couple of random thoughts here about which leads to pick from:

- a series of stabbing piano's playing a chord session
- a wide range of synthesizer sounds that shape the lead
- a classic acoustic guitar
- a set of violins to play a lead
- a short piece comming from an excisting audio track that is being looped over and over again

... just to name a few

The last one is probably the most common one. I personally think, when you would listen to most of the commercial tracks, the house genre will probably be the one genre that 'steals' the sounds from other existing music pieces. Those are mostly known as 'covers'. And personally, I don't like that type of music. Heck, I don't like commercial tracks anyways... I am more the underground dog that wants to stick with something original rather then to borrow a given audio track from another music composer. But just to say, it is simply an option to do so...

Personally when it comes to building up the synthetic kind of sound in a complete house track, I most likely go for the synths like the subtractor or thor in this matter. The Malstrom is a beast when it comes to creating pads in a sequence, or very good for making trance leads (sawtooth*16 anyone?!). However usually I stick with the other two with some exceptions.

On the otherhand, when making leads that are based on samples, I would recommend the NN-XT over the NN-19 sampler in most cases. The NN-XT remote programmer has some real cool features to screw around with. Just look at the next picture and compare it with a normal set of options that the NN-19 sampler has to offer... I think it speaks for itself:

In some cases I would recommend using the accoustic guitars, and load those up inside the NN-XT (these are the default set of guitars which are located inside the guitar and plucked section of the nn-xt).On the otherhand using pianos inside a complete house production usually works very well in most cases. Especially the bright piano or the CP80(X) score very high on my personal production list.

other sampler patches to use inside a complete house song would be using organs. The default m100 organs are mostly pretty softy by the default settings. But we could easaly rough things up with using a scream 4 destortion unit, or combine it with a fuzz setting. Do not underestimate the usage of the scream 4 sound destruction unit on this matter. It may 'destroy' the sound, but sometimes it is exactly what we need to spice up the leads.

What applies to the basslines inside any house track, it could apply to a complete house lead as well. Going nuts on effects such as reverb engines, chorus effects, delays, filters... the works.

So yeah, so far this is all the theory behind what kind of leads could work. Since there are so many different ways to shape a lead sound inside house music, I think it is going to be really hard to cover almost everything. I am just going to give a few examples on what you might want to go for, on the other hand, use your imagination and your creativity.

Stabbing leads

One of the most common leads inside house are the stabbing leads. These are mostly chord sessions (A, C, E resulting into Aminor or D,F,A resulting into a Dminor just to give a few examples). Inside propellerheads reason factory soundbank, you might find some interesting stabbers inside the "Other samples" sections when you would load up an NN19 or NN-XT sampler. These stabs work very well within hip hop loops or house sequences. Just as an example, I am using the Detroit Stabber inside the NN-XT with the next RNS example file:

Download RNS songfile: Lead Stabbing
Download Mp3: Lead Stabbing

On the other hand, one could go for a traditional piano, but re-shape it to make something unique from it again.

Download RNS songfile: Lead Stabbing piano
Download Mp3: Lead Stabbing piano

Making alternate leads using audio samples

One approach to go for is using snippets from existing audio tracks and remix those making it into a house track. Due to copyright issues I can't really use a single existing song that I have written that uses this technique. However, I can show you how it kind of works when loading up a DrRex loop file (which also contains certain 'audio tracks'). For instance if you take the guitar loops or the hip hop loops, it should give some idea on what I mean with it. Even though these are most likely DrRex files, and sliced up into sections, its also an option to use the NN-XT or NN-19 sampler to create the same techniques. It just requires some time and effort on creating the right tempo.

Since in most cases, one could just resample a portion on an audio file (there are thousands of free tools on the net which can edit Wav files, just google for it and you should be able to find some. Preferably I would use recycle on this matter though. Since it also can export it towards .REX format to load up inside the Dr Rex loop player, nn19 or NN-XT. However there are so many ways to get some audio samples inside Reason. However to do it perfectly it is probably going to be a time consuming part. When I get the chance, I might wright some extended tutorial about how to get exteral sounds inside Reason... but don't expect me to actually remember me to write one, since I have so much stuff inside my head right now.

Anyways, the example I am going for with the next example file is using a Dr Rex file and use a single loop as a lead. Going nuts on filters, effects the works... And the way I have tweaked the samples, I doubt you will recognize what samples I have used for this example file.

Download RNS songfile: Using audio samples
Download Mp3: Using audio samples

Making leads using synthesizer from the ground up

Another method one could go for is making their own unique sound, or re-use certain sounds and shape them differently. This is probably the fun part with making house music. Anything goes.. there is not really a "must have" or "can't have" when it comes to making house music leads. As long as the tone is set right, the vibe is right, and the mood is set right. That is basicly all that matters.

On a personal note, one thing I have found what works best in most ways, is using combinator patches. Even though you only tend to use one device, planning ahead will usually pay off. The thing with combinator patches is that you can use multiple sounds inside one single device, and save it as one single patch. When you want to re-use the exact same sound, or even better yet use the same sound but minorly changed, you can easaly copy the complete instrument just by loading up the combinator patch and making modifications from there on. That is probably the easiest way to set it up. And one could make a custom made library of combinator patches (which I strongly can recommend anyone to do, no matter what). I mean just take a look inside the topics "Getting everything out the combinator part 1". It basicly explains how to expand a complete combinator patch in a full rich resourcefull instrument. This is also something that applies to house music.

But anyways, the whole idea behind setting up a complete combinator patch, its very diverse in sound. One could use any given sampler, synthesizer and route those in all kinds of different ways (multiband compression?! anyone?!) and create something that would scare the socks of any given vst instrument.

Download RNS songfile: Creating leads from the ground up
Download Mp3: Creating leads from the ground up

Using real instruments inside your house production

Another option to shape your complete house production is using real life instruments. Just to name a few: saxophones, violins, harps, trumpets etc. Most of these instruments can be found inside the orchestral soundbank which ships with propellerhead reason. Another resource would be the Reason factory soundbank and go inside the NN-XT or NN19 patches. In this case I prefer the NN-XT over the NN19 sampler patches since I have a feeling that the NN19 lacks sound output when comparing the two. But that is my personal opinion.

Just as an example, I am trowing in a complete production I have been working on last friday night. It does contain a crap load of subtractors (hey, what can I say... I am a subtractor freak myself). But in the end of the song you will notice that I use a saxophone series as a lead combined with some raw shaped fm driven sound. Which make the sound a bit more 'unreal' rather then having a stable saxophone.

Download RNS songfile: Using real instruments in a house production (ps, this file is 6mb insize since I used a bit of a large vocal ;))
Download Mp3: Using real instruments in a house production

This covers some of the possibilities when it comes to making leads inside your house music production. Offcourse there are a lot more ways to make leads, but like I said, I could go on for ever.