Pattern
Dance floor
Four on the floor with an open hat on every offbeat. The bass only plays between the kicks, so they never fight.
A free pack
House party
by The house band · 6 items · every one follows your project's key
House is built on one decision: a kick drum on every beat, forever. Everything else in the track is placed around that kick so that nothing fights it. Here are the pieces, one at a time.
Sign in to collect this pack
Free. It lands in your library, ready to drop into any project.
What is inside
Press play on any of them. They loop until you stop them.
Pattern
Piano anthem
Four bars, four chords: 1, 6, 4, 5. Stabbed three times a bar, the way house pianos do.
Pattern
Build up
Claps that get louder and kicks that get closer together. Put it before the part you want to hit hardest.
Recipe
Piano stabs
Short chords in a pattern of three against the four of the kick. That pull is what makes you move.
The kick on every beat
Dance floor lights the kick on steps 1, 5, 9 and 13 and never moves it. The clap goes on beats two and four. Because the kick is so predictable, your body locks on to it, and everything else becomes about what happens between the kicks.
Everything else lives in the gaps
The open hi-hat sits exactly halfway between each pair of kicks, on the offbeat. The bass in Dance floor only plays there too. Low sounds blur into each other, so keeping the bass out of the kick's way is the oldest trick in dance music, and you can hear the mix get cleaner for it.
Octave bass takes a different route: the same note, low on the beat and an octave higher off it. It never stops moving and never changes note until the chord does.
Stabs and build ups
Piano stabs plays short chords in a pattern of three against the kick's four. The two patterns drift apart and meet again every bar, and that pull is a big part of why house makes you move. Piano anthem uses the chords 1, 6, 4, 5, four bars and four chords.
Build up is the bar before the big moment: claps that get louder with every hit and kicks that get closer together until there is one on every step. Put it right before the section you want to land hardest.
Questions people ask
- What BPM is house music?
- Between about 118 and 128 beats per minute. This pack is at 124.
- What does four on the floor mean?
- A kick drum on all four beats of the bar. The name comes from drummers, who play the kick with a foot on the floor.
- Why does the bass play on the offbeat in house?
- Because the kick owns the beat. Two low sounds at the same moment turn to mud, so the bass waits for the gap, and the two end up bouncing off each other.
Now change it.
Drop any of these into a project and every step, note and sound is yours to move. That is how you find out why it works.