Software synths for house chords?

[antarktika]

its all about getting the job done, no?
want house chord, do house chord.

That's exactly my point, and they have Massive, so you've got the tool, now make a house chord with it, info on programming a Deadmau5/Afrojack chord in Massive fills pages worth of youtube tutorials!

The reason that ensemble is simple and gets the job done quickly is that it:

created a chord by setting OSC2 to pitch 3, OSC3 to pitch 7

here's the rest of that statement:

but I'd rather not do it that way. I'm a pianist by training.

Sooooooo? draw your own conclusions? besides, they already said they don't own Reaktor! spending hundreds of dollars is not a simple solution to getting a house chord, making one with the already capable tool available to the OP seems like a far better use of their resources. Like Slicedbread said, you don't even need Massive for this, since it's all basic waveforms you could even build it out of Live's standard instruments if you wanted.

As a further note to the OP, you can use those tutorials where they created a chord by voicing the oscillators, and just skip the voicing part, the real magic of the sound is what they do with the filter envelope/lfo, so if you found a good tutorial, but it relied on the preset voicing method, you can still use that, and just skip the part where they set the oscillator pitches to different intervals.

[Tympanic]

but then, who wants to listen to house chords? (no offense)

[antarktika]

but then, who wants to listen to house chords? (no offense)

Ziiing, but judging by the popularity of Afrojack and Deadma5, apparently a lot of people!