How To Start Producing House Music

What’s up guys! This is a pretty niche topic, but I’ve gotten a few requests about it over the recent months. A lot of you are interested in how to produce house music. House music is a subgenre within EDM that focuses on a steady four on the floor kick rhythm with off beat hi hats and tasty top end samples and vocals. 

So, without further adieu, let’s jump right in!

How is house music different from other kinds of electronic music?

To learn how to produce house music, you should have a light grasp on the different kinds of subgenres within electronic music. These include (but aren’t limited to) Techno, House, Trance, Trap, and Drum and Bass. So lets hop into that real quick:

Techno

Techno is the mother of modern day electronic music. It’s characterized by a repetitive four on the floor beat and is usually in 4/4. Techno is typically within 120-150bpm.

House

House, like I mentioned earlier, is also characterized by a repetitive four on the floor beat, and is also usually in 4/4. The characteristics are similar to techno, but house differentiates itself from techno in that it tends to have more off beat and syncopated rhythms in its hi hats, claps, snaps, and chord grooves. It’s usually within 120-130bpm

Trance

Trance is a subgenre of EDM that focuses on repetitive grooves and chords with micro adjustments throughout the piece. The genre is typically within 100-125bpm and focuses on hypnotizing grooves.

Trap

Trap is basically fancy techno that emphasizes the contrast between triplets and doubles within hi hat grooves

Drum and Bass

Drum and Bass is one of the faster subgenres of electronic music. It’s usually within 165-185bpm and has a focus on fast breakbeats, and heavy bass/synth lines.

Cool! Moving on to the actual process of how to make this stuff...

Whenever you’re creating music, you want to break your track into two main parts: the foundation and the focus. Just about every track has these two elements. The foundation is what holds down the fort in a song. It’s the part of a song that everything else rests on. The focus is your ear candy and topline. It’s what keeps someone engaged in listening to your song. For the purposes of this blog, we’re gonna start from the bottom up.

Let’s start with your foundation.

In house music, the foundation of songs is usually a four on the floor kick clap pattern. Your kick should be hitting every beat and your claps should be hitting on beats 2 and 4. The kicks anchor the song and the claps emphasize the passage of time in a track by highlighting the off beats. You can also add extra claps and vary the pattern to add interest. This is the basic foundation of a house beat.

Moving forward, you’ll want to add the bass line. In house music, the bass line is usually quite syncopated. Change the grid in your DAW or Midi editor to 16th notes, and start playing off of the off beats to create a groove that contrasts well with the kicks and claps. This results in an interesting bass line that stands out on top of the drum groove.

What about the focus?

The ear catching parts of a house track are generally the chords, melody, and effects. For your chords, you’ll want to incorporate elements from jazz or funk type chords (7ths, 9ths, etc). Mess around with those a bit, choose your favorite and go to town layering stabs on top of your existing foundation! You can adjust the top note of each chord to create a compelling melody. Most house tracks have a melody that’s the same rhythm as the chords.

After you’ve got that set, you pretty much have the start of a house track! To add excitement to the track, you can add extra synth/bass sounds or adjust the groove. You can also add effects like sweeps, impacts, and downlifters to create tension and release in the song. Lastly, you’ll want to polish off the track by automating elements like volume, filters, reverb/delay, and other audio effect elements!

Before we go, let’s talk structure just a little bit!

Depending on what you’re creating the track for, your song can be anywhere from 3-10 minutes. The shorter side (3-4 minutes) tends to apply more to radio type releases whereas the longer tracks are for club mixes. As far as arrangement goes, the conventional house track is organized in the following way:

Intro (optional) - Breakdown - Drop - Drop Variation - Breakdown - Drop - outro (optional)

I like to break each of these elements into 8 or 16 bar segments for consistency! That way each section has time to develop and be heard, but isn’t so long that the listener gets bored.

I hope this tutorial helped! Happy production to you all! As always, I’m down to hop on a call sometime and set up some production lessons if you want to dive deeper into this stuff!

Spike