Electronic · house · 4/4 straight

House (four on the floor)

124 bpm Loop: all
16ths

Mixer

Keyboard

House — kick on every quarter (four-on-floor), clap on 2 and 4 (backbeat), open hi-hat on every and, closed hat ticking the sixteenths in between. That drum sentence is the whole genre; everything else is placement around it.

How it sits: the bass plays only on the off-beat eighths, between the kicks, so kick and bass alternate like a pump (the classic "kick–bass–kick–bass"). The piano/organ stab lands on the and of 1, the and of 2 and beat 4 — short, the last one a little longer — a minor-seventh voicing with the root on top. Gm7 then Cm7, one chord per bar.

Listen for the open hat and the bass sharing the off-beat: together they are the lift that makes a straight kick dance. The stabs should never sit on a kick.

Practice: loop the drums, add the bass until the alternation is mechanical, then drop the stabs in on the ands.

Sources

  • standard practice; no transcribed source

Keyboard

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1–6
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Tempo −5 / +5
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