In this tutorial
My notes from this video
Before I make any sounds, I'm a big fan of having a little bit of room between every chord. With that little bit of room, the chords get more bounce and tightness.
You also don't have to follow the basic chord rules. My first chord is a G major, but with the D as the bass note. Feel free to add extensions, like another D, or take the F sharp up one more. Every change gives a different sound, so you get a lot more variations in your chords. Lower notes and higher notes together make it a very full chord.
I aim for four or five chord layers. No mono and no gliding, because we're going to hit a lot of chords. I'm always doing this. A very basic detuned chord, another detuned chord with a little bit less detune, and then one main chaos chord. In the mix I give priority to that chaos chord. The detuned ones are just there to fill it up.
The chaos chord is one technique I absolutely love in Serum, and it's very simple. LFO 1 goes to the fine tune at a high rate, with BPM off. The most important trick is the mod source on the coarse pitch. Set it to Chaos 1, turn the Chaos 1 rate up in the Global tab and take the amount down in the matrix. Do the same for oscillator B, put it one octave up and add the detune. It's such a wide chord with so much detune and power.
Most of these chords need to be consistent. You can add that pitch up effect. LFO 2 goes to the global master tune, up one octave with 19, and make sure you put it on envelope. It also adds a little bit of an attack in the beginning.
If you're doing this, put it on every chord or most of the chords. Otherwise it sounds a little bit weird in the background. The down effect doesn't need to happen with every chord, the up effect does. In this case I'm keeping the whole thing neutral, no pitching up.
The chord processing is literally the exact same as the lead processing. An EQ with the bass cut, but don't cut out all the bass. A Fruity Compressor around minus nine with a ratio of four, then a CLA-2A. Don't use too much peak reduction or it really sounds clicky. I want the chords to not punch through too much. They need to be slightly on the low end. An Oxford Inflator on top, then a Pro-Q 3 as the dynamic and corrective EQ for the final tweaks.
Then the leads and chords go together into one channel, the total send. Get rid of the bass one more time and add an inflator again, so it stays at zero dB. With this setup you can change individual elements of the layer and completely change it, and it still sounds really good.
FL Studio·Serum·Fruity Parametric EQ 2·Fruity Compressor·Waves CLA-2A·Sonnox Oxford Inflator·FabFilter Pro-Q 3
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