Production Tutorial: How To Make House Music Like Nora En Pure

Nora En Pure’s signature style of house music production helped her define an emotive style that continues to thrive. Get inspired and try your hand at this emotive style with the tutorials below.

Writing Pianos Like Nora En Pure

Nora’s music pulls at our heartstrings because its bedrock harmonies have a lot of emotional weight to them and allow the track to take listeners on a journey. The groove, sound design, drum programming, and other productions tricks need to be on point, but your chord progressions are what will be doing most of the heavy lifting.

This means it’s always best for you to start with the chords before moving on to any of the fancy stuff.

Here’s how it’s done…

Step 1: Load Up Your Favorite Piano

Nora’s music is soft and sentimental; often relying on strings and pianos to play its harmonies. So before we get into the weeds, load up your favorite piano. Don’t worry if you don’t have an expensive third-party VST like Kontakt as every DAW has at least one stock piano sound.

Starting with a piano serves two purposes.

The first, and most obvious, is that pianos are a staple in the sound palette of Nora and her label Purified. So it makes sense we would begin the song with one.

The second reason, and an often unspoken of one, is that pianos are a fairly predictable instrument. This means composing on them arguably more effective than on pads or strings; as these instruments’ evolve more over time and don’t always give a clear representation of the music they’re playing (especially when initially riffing out early ideas).

Pianos ensure that you put the music first, not the sound design, which is essential for these musically-driven styles of productions.

Click next to learn how to how to write chords progressions 👉

Programming Drums Like Nora En Pure

Unlike most other genres of dance music, the percussions in the music that Nora makes act more as a delivery system for the melodies and aren’t the primary driving force of the groove overall. This makes them easier to program but harder to get just right.

Because while the rythmns themselves usually are usually just comprised of the hats, claps, and kick (which we’ll cover in it’s own section later on), the texture and selection of those samples is paramount to achieving the softer and more sentimental vibe typically seen in Nora’s music.

Here’s how I get it done…

Step 1: Choosing A Clap

The primary rhythm percussion outside of the kick drum is going to be your clap.

For these softer, melodic techno and progressive house genres, you are going to want to find a short and snappy clap sample without a lot of high end. This is because you are aiming for a softer and warm sounding percussion kit and having bright and digital-sounding frequencies in your claps will make them stick out like a soar thumb.

On the same note, you want them snappy as to not detract too much attention away from the melodies we’ll be forming later on. So find a sample that you link, and then tighten it up to taste using the ADSR envelopes commonly found in all stock samplers.

These claps are there to help softly drive the track forward. No more; no less.

Click next to find out how to add syncopation to your drums 👉

Choosing Kick Drums Like Nora En Pure

The kick drum is the most important part of the dance music track, even for the softer genres like what Nora is doing (but you know that already didn’t you?).

But all too often, I see producers choosing entirely the wrong samples for their tracks; and in doing so, they make the mix harder, the texture of the drums changes, and the entire vibe of the record is thrown off.

You’re not looking for an EDM-style kick with a heavy and thwacking transient just as much as you don’t want a booming 808 typical in more classic Chicago-house tracks.

So let’s dive into a few ways to choose a kick sample and process it in a way that perfectly fits the vibe of our melodic house track.

Choosing Kick Drums Like Nora En Pure

Choosing The Right Sample

Check out the two kick samples that are loaded up. Notice how the top kick’s transient noticeably sticks out? That might sound good on a massive Eric Prydz’s record, but will be detrimental to the energy of the softer sound we are after.

Punchy low and and medium to soft transients are what you’re looking for in your sample selection here. See just how different the waveform of the second kick is compared to the first? That punchy decay and softer attack will sound ideal in the track we are working towards.

We are going to learn how to process these samples a bit more in the next slide, but as long as you have these two qualities locked down you should be well on your way to getting a great kick drum.

Scroll to Continue

Processing Drums Like Nora En Pure

Choosing the right samples is paramount to getting a good drum sound, but how you process these samples together through the drum bus is what’s going to give your drums texture, life, and individuality.

Remember that we are shooting for a softer, lush, and textured vibe with our drums here. So let’s see what types of plugins will be most useful to achieve this end.

Step One: Saturation

To get that warm, beefy, and rounded sound typically seen in expensive hardware, saturation will be your best friend.

And when it comes to processing the drum group all together, SoundToy’s Decapitator is the absolute best option. But whichever saturator you choose, what you are aiming to do is add harmonics to the drums and exciting its frequencies; creating a warmer result.

Saturating entire groups, or busses, of instruments also helps blur the lines between samples you’ve selected; giving them a form of gloss that helps various samples from different sample libraries feel as if they are coming from the same drum kit!

Now let’s move on to reductive EQing.

Creating A Bass Line Like Nora En Pure

This is where the drive and energy of our track really starts to take on a life of its own, but it can also be one of the most difficult parts of the song to nail down correctly.

So let’s look at how it’s done…

Step 1: Choosing a VST for the bass line

Nora En Pure is known for the warm and punchy analog flavor in much of her synths and sound design, so it’s an easy choice when picking which tool is best for this job.

Diva offers all the warm timbral qualities we are looking for in a synth, and even scrolling through one of its hundreds of bass presets will get us a patch worth using.

Now it’s time to actually start writing in our bass line.

Writing A Melody Like Nora En Pure

Nora En Pure’s real emotional pull, and arguably the primary reason why she is so popular, is on her heart-string pulling melodies and arpeggiators. They add texture, euphoria, energy, and movement to Nora’s songs in one fell swoop.

So let’s learn how you can recreate similar melodies using some of the chords we’ve already written as a jumping off point.

Step 1: Choosing Your Synth

Much like our bass line synth from the previous section, we are looking for a synth that can achieve a warm, lush timbre. For Ableton users, Analog is an obvious choice.

Why not just use another instance of Diva you ask?

Genres that rely heavily on texture and sonic character in the music work best by having a diverse palette of sounds. If you reach for the same synth in every situation, you run the risk of having your music sound like a demo track of a preset bundle.

Each synth brings its own character and nuance, and using a few different ones across the length of a project allows you to get the best of all worlds.

Finishing Touches

By now, we have created the backbone of a killer Nora En Pure style track. But this genre of music is so much more than just a cool melody and some textural drums.

To really make a phenomenal record in the style of Nora En Pure, you need to focus on the details and find ways to add layers of ear candy to fill out the frequency spectrum so that the track feels detailed, lush, and full.

So let’s dive into some of my favorite rapid-fire ways to fill out a melodic house track.

Option 1: Strings

Atmospheric and emotional strings are a staple of these softer melodic genres for many reasons.

First, the timbre and texture of the sound is soft and slowly evolving which oftentimes compliments the more digital plugins and stabs of the rest of the sonic pallet of the track.

Second, strings simply are more emotional than many standard pad patches and the familiarity to the sound is pleasing for most listeners (it’s something easy to latch on to)

Finally, strings out of samplers and romplers usually have a very interesting width aspect to the sounds that is baked into the sample. As such, they often help elevate the stereo field of a record by occupying parts of the stereo field that otherwise go unused.

Where To Go Next

Nora En Pure’s style of production has been rising n popularity a ton over the past years, and we know of a few great teachers online that offer more killer tutorials on the topic if you are thirsty for more information.

Here is the short list of the best melodic house tutorials we’ve found while writing this article.

Nora En Pure Via EDMTips

Will Darling over at EDMTips offers a wealth of incredible knowledge on producing almost every genre of dance music.

Why This Tutorial Rocks: Will prides himself on using predominantly Ableton plugins, which means you don’t need many of the fancy plugins I used in this piece to achieve the results that he does! Plus he gives away the project files completely for free.

What You’ll Learn: Will takes you step by step through the entire track creation process, even down to arrangement and ear candy (which is arguably one of the most important aspects fo this style of production.

Nora En Pure Via Bound To Divide

Bound To Divide is one of my favorite dudes to learn production from. Not only is he a great teacher, but he’s actively releasing music on some of my favorite labels in the game so you know he walks the walk and talks the talk.

Why This Tutorial Rocks: BtD focuses heavily on the exact instruments and sounds you need to be using to really get the most out of this genre. Sure, much of what he covered has already been hit in this article, but a new perspective and going through a different set of motions can be invaluable.

What You’ll Learn: BtD will dive DEEP into the sound palette of Nora En pure’s music as well as how to get the most out of the arrangement when making music in this style. Seeing as the section on arrangement is the longest part of the video, you know he shares some quality information you can’t afford to miss.

Source link

Search in the website:

Share this page on:

Production Tutorial: How To Make House Music Like Nora En Pure