For the fish I have ro is the best option tho it will not suit some. I have a dilemma here. Don't want to lose my angels n neons for some plat ties but I must decide soon. All are good now inc Corey's but I don't want them to suffer in hard water. Which is the case.
Nitrate levels
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If the only issue is nitrate, you can filter the source water. @AbbeysDad does this with good success.
But if you also want to reduce the GH, the only method is by diluting the source water with the addition of "pure" water. You can reduce the GH/KH proportionally, or you could go all the way and use just pure water which would be zero GH/KH with an acidic pH resulting in the aquarium. @seangee follows this method (so far as I know). This would obviously solve the nitrate problem too. "Pure" water means RO usually, though distilled is also pure. [And rainwater can be used depending upon location, etc, just for those interested in the whole story.]
If you intend soft water fish species only, the full RO (pure) water option is safe. There is no need to re-mineralize for most soft water species. I am fortunate to have basically zero GH/KH source water, and I add nothing to raise GH or KH. The pH will naturally be acidic, which suits soft water species most of them anyway.
Keep in mind that only soft water species are suited to pure water. Angelfish, neon tetras, cories were mentioned and these are OK; most fish from South America, and SE Asia, similar. Platies obviously not, they will be in poor health from the beginning and slowly die from this or that without sufficient mineral in the water; this applies to all livebearers.
Yes I do. I started mixing tap water with RO but that was frustrating because I still had to filter the tap water because of high nitrates so I switched to RO only for 2 of my tanks.
For the sake of completeness my third tank has cherry shrimp and a nerite. Neither of these can cope with 0 hardness but are ok in moderately soft water. This tank also gets RO water but I re-mineralise it using a product called Salty Shrimp GH/KH+. (There are other products that achieve the same thing). In this tank I have dGH = 6 and dKH = 3. The reason I chose this product is I only need a singe product, it is absolutely consistent (I add the same amount to every bucket of new water for identical results) and it dissolves instantly without colouring or clouding the water. At 3dKH this is sufficient to keep the pH at 7 with a regular weekly 75% water change.
But here we are back to adding more stuff to the water again.
You can't turn soft water into hard(er) water without adding stuff to it.
Then you should be purchasing livestock compatible with your water. 
The chemicals used to make water harder are those same chemicals found naturally in hard water. If we travelled to a hard water region to collect water then took it back to a soft water area and put in in a tank, we wouldn't complain about using chemicals; adding hardness minerals gives us water as though we had actually done that.
It’s still not natural and still my opinion that you should purchase livestock compatible with your home water.
'Hardeneing' the water just sounds like too much hard work to me. I always stick with fish that like my water.
I did see au tube vid once where a guy had a large cichlids tank with a large external vegetation filter with tropical vines and plants. Not an option for me but it was impressive. I'm sure he said that he now doesn't need to water change anymore. I'll try to find it again.
There are people who claim it’s been a year since a water change. I can claim that I eat ice cream everyday with no heart problems too...until it’s too late. Point is, nothing replaces water changes in healthy tanks.
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