How to Make Classic Deep House: The Ultimate Guide for Producers (2024)

So, looking for a guide on how to make classic Deep House? Well, today is your lucky day!

Classic Deep House is known for its soulful and groovy approach to House music. Instead of focusing on making the biggest drop, the accent is put on interesting jazzy progressions and layers.

In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about making your first classic Deep House track. Let’s get started!

So… What is Deep House?

Deep House is a subgenre of House music. It combines the classic 4-to-the-floor beats with more adventurous chord progressions. Think of it as House meeting Jazz and Soul.

The focus is less on the dancefloor, and more on the journey. The melodies and chord progressions are more complex. And classic Deep House tracks often feature more layers of sounds than classic House.

By the way, if you’re looking to make classic House, check out our full tutorial here.

Deep House producers will often use jazz-influenced chords and smooth vocal samples to give their tracks a soulful touch. Check out Kerri Chandler, Maya Jane Coles, and Jimpster if you want to discover some classic Deep House tracks.

Step #1: Setting our BPM and Structure

The first thing I always do when starting a new track is to bring in a reference track.

We’ve talked about reference tracks before here at EDMProd. They can help you generate ideas, polish your mixdown, and much more. In this case, we are going to use our reference track to map out the structure.

I’m going to use a track called Under the Sea from Black Loops, which is one of my favorite Classic Deep House tracks of all time:

Let’s drag this track into our project, and then create a blank MIDI channel called “structure”.

This will be where we will map out with empty MIDI clips the arrangement.

As for the BPM, I’m going to set it to 125. Deep Housetends to sit around 120 to 128, so with 125 being sort of an average.

Next up, let’s solo our reference track and listen to it. What we’re doing here is listening for what’s happening every eight bars.

Press Shift+ Command M to create the first MIDI clip, then start naming them. For the first clip, let’s call in “Intro Drums”. Continue like this by duplicating your MIDI clips and naming them based on the reference track.

Here’s the structure I ended up with based on our reference track:

For the sake of this tutorial, I’ve only mapped out the first half of the song.

Once that’s done, you can delete the reference track, and let’s get started 😎

Step #2: Laying Down some Groovy Drums

First things first, let’s start with the drums. There are many other ways you can start a song. This is just a personal preference, but I feel like starting with the drums gives me a good framework for the track.

When I make classic Deep House, I love to use Ableton Live’s Drum Rack to do all my drum programming.

I’m usually a huge fan of using audio samples directly on the audio channels. But there’s something special about doing it all in a drum rack, which is the old-school workflow.

Let’s create a new MIDI clip, and load up some samples:

Let’s lay down a classic beat, with a kick on each beat and a clap on every second beat:

In this example, I’ve actually layered two different claps. You might often find that using just one clap sounds a bit thin. So layering two different ones with slightly different tones is a great trick. You can even add a bit of track delay to give them a more organic feel.

Next, let’s grab a closed hi-hat and place it on the offbeat:

Here’s what it sounds like:

By the way, we’re looking for ways to make your hi-hats sound less robotic, check out our advanced guide here.

Let’s add in another percussion real quick to really get a vibe going:

I’ve added this sort of shaker perc, as well as doubling the hi-hat on some beats.

Adding some groove

Right now it all sounds a bit robotic because everything is on the grid. So let’s add a bit of swing from the Groove Pools.

For classic Deep House, I love to use the “MPC 16 swing” grooves.

I settled on the “MPC4000 16 Swing 61” – but you can choose any one you prefer.

I feel like our beat is still a bit empty right now, so let’s add some more percs:

This is going to constitute our main beat for the drop. I’m already anticipating an open hi-hat on the second part of the drop, so let’s add that in already:

And that’s pretty much it for our drums! Next up, let’s move on to our bass.

Want to check out this tutorial in video format? Head over to our YouTube channel:

Step #3: Adding a Deep House Bass

For our Deep House bass, I’m going to load up Serum.

In classic Deep House, the bassline is both a harmonic and a rhythmic element. It plays a key role, but you also don’t want to overdo it.

Let me show you what I mean. I’m going to start off with a preset. For Deep House, you’ll find that a lot of simple low-passed, simple analog waveforms will do the trick.

For this track, I’m going to be working in Bm. In the Piano Roll, hit the “highlight scale” so that you will only see notes within the scale.

I’ve chosen a quite “subby” bass in Serum. Here’s the pattern I went with. In general, with Deep House, we want to place our bass in between the kick drums:

Pro-tip 1: make sure to drag the same groove you used on your drums onto your bass MIDI clip! This will ensure drums and bass are in lockstep.

Pro-tip 2: enable Mono and Legato to avoid notes overlapping each other.

Next up, let’s play with some of the settings inside of Serum. I’ve shortened the ADSR envelope just a tad, and added in a bit of saturation. This will make the bass stand out just a little more.

Finally, let’s add a bit of sidechain compression. I would normally set up a separate sidechain trigger, but for this style of Deep House, it’s not really that necessary. Let’s grab our kick from the drum rack post mixer, EQ the input, and set a fast attack and fast release and full ratio. Make sure your compressor is set to Peak as well, otherwise, you’ll lose a bit of energy:

That’s our bass wrapped up!

Step #4: Adding Atmosphere with Pads and Keys

Let’s load up a new MIDI track for our pads and keys.

In terms of Deep House, we are going to use a lot of seventh chords and minor 7th chords.

So we’re going to use our Bm scale and create some nice seventh chords with some stabs. Let’s start off with some stock sounds from Ableton Live by browsing the “Sounds” library.

I found this “Chord Soft Keys” which sounds amazing:

With Deep House, there’s no need for super technical sound design. Often, the right sample will do the work for you.

Let’s add a bit of reverb now to this stab. I’m using again a stock effect from Ableton Live. I’ve also switched the density to “Low”. This will give our reverb a more gritty sound which is perfect for Deep House:

This is what it sounds like now:

In this case, the 7th chord is already built into the sample, so I only need to draw one note in the Piano Roll. I’m also going to add an Auto-Filter with some Envelope following as well as some Echo:

Next up, let’s add some more texture with a pad. This pad will play pretty much constantly, giving a nice background to the track.

I found this loop that has a great vibe on Splice. This is going to be our starting point for our pad:

The first thing I’m going to do is reverse it (by simply pressing R on our keyboard) and pitch it in key with our track.

Next up, let’s high-pass it, add some Redux to give it a LoFi quality, and mono it with a Utility plugin:

As you can hear, this pad is really in the background. The goal isn’t for it to stand out, but simply to fill out the spectrum.

Finally, let’s add in a soft little melody:

Sounding nice 😍

That’s pretty much it for our pads and keys! Now let’s move to one of the most important elements of Deep House – the vocals.

Step #5: Adding Vocals for that Classic Deep House Feel

Adding a little vocal sample is key to getting that classic Deep House feel. You don’t need a full vocal performance, but just a few single words at the right moment will make the track come to life.

Add a bit of reverb and delay, and it’s in the bag. Honestly, you don’t need to overdo this part if you find the right sample.

Step #6: Fleshing Out the Arrangement

Now that we have most of our elements in place, let’s start fleshing out the structure a bit more.

Firstly, let’s create some sort of fill. For this, I’m going to load up another drum rack with some 909 samples.

The goal here is to create some sort of transition between section A and section B of our drop:

No need to overcomplicate it, just a few toms and snares will do the job:

We can duplicate this fill 8 bars later, and create a slightly different pattern. Muting the kick is also a super effective way of hinting at a transition. Looking for more ways to create cool transitions? Check out our extensive guide over here.

At this point, I also feel like adding some strings could really complement the arrangement.

LABS by Spitfire Audio is a great free plugin with some awesome-sounding strings. In this case, I went with Analog Lab 5 by Arturia, which is a more pricey option.

Here are the notes I added to our arrangement:

All that’s left to do now is to build out the intro and breakdown.

When you start with the drop like we did, this is actually quite easy. All you have to do is selectively remove some elements. For the breakdown, leave for example the entire beat but remove the kick. For the intro, start with just the hats and some background elements, and build from there. You get the idea 😉

Step #7: Mixdown and Mastering

Finally, let’s wrap up this tutorial with some mixing and mastering tips.

The drums sound good as is to me, so no need for complex processing. Just a bit of gain staging will do the trick.

For our melodic elements, the first thing to check is that they are all properly side-chained. This will allow the track to pump naturally. Next up, don’t forget to EQ each sound so there aren’t too many overlapping frequencies. This is especially important in the low-mid frequencies.

Finally, for the mastering, you’re just going to add:

• multiband compression;
• glue compression;
• channel EQ;
• limiter.

Make sure to use your reference track at this stage to check the frequency spectrum. Are there enough highs? Too much bass? Make any adjustments necessary.

We have a full course on mastering here, so make sure to check that out.

And that’s a wrap on our classic Deep House track! Here’s the final product:

That’s It for this Guide on How to Make Classic Deep House! 🙏

And that’s a wrap for this guide on how to make classic Deep House. We hope you found it useful and were inspired to use some of these techniques and sounds in your own tracks.

Make sure to grab the full project file for Ableton Live as well as the samples and presets used for this track below. And if you have any questions, drop us a line over at [email protected]!