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- House Music and its different Styles
- Friday, September 19, 2008
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Hey Everyone,
we are really excited to announce the new additions to our trakPack selection with the addition of our Large trakPack bundles. You can now purchase bundles with 100 loops in 10 bundles for the great price of $19.99.
To coincide with the release of these new bundles, I decided to concentrate this weblog on explaining some of the styles within Dance music. This week’s weblog will highlight the different styles within House music.
By far one of the most popular styles of dance music, house music represents a collection of styles of electronic dance music, with its earliest forms beginning the early to mid 1980s.
Wikipedia gives a good explanation of the musical elements that make up the styles of House music. The common element of house music is a prominent kick drum on every beat (also known as a four-to-the-floor beat), usually generated by a drum machine or sampler. The kick drum sound is augmented by various kick fills and extended dropouts. The drum track is filled out with hihat cymbal patterns on the eighth-note offbeats, and a snare drum or clap sound on beats two and four of every bar. This pattern is derived from so-called “four-on-the-floor” dance drumbeats of the 1960s and especially the 1970s disco drummers. Producers commonly layer sampled drum sounds to achieve a more complex sound, filling out the audio spectrum and tailoring the mix for large club sound systems.
House music is uptempo music for dancing and has a tempo range of between 118 and 135 bpm. Producers use many different sound sources for bass sounds in house music, from continuous, repeating electronically-generated lines sequenced on a synthesizer such as a Roland TB-303 to studio recordings or samples of live electric bassists, or simply filtered-down samples from whole stereo recordings (from classic funk tracks or any other song). Electronically-generated sounds and samples of recordings from genres such as jazz, blues and synth pop are often added to the foundation of the drum beat and synth bass line. House songs may also include disco or soul-style and gospel vocals and additional percussion. Techno and trance, which developed alongside house music, share this basic beat infrastructure, but they usually eschew house’s live-music-influenced feel and Black or Latin music influences in favor of more synthetic sound sources and approach.
The people over at 3345.com also gives us a good insight into the elements that go into making house music as well as the different styles of house which are outlined below. House consists of a 4/4 regular beat, rolling keyboards, synthesizers, male or female vocals and plenty of attitude. Upon the main foundation, samples of music are added, such as jazz, blues, synth pop and so on. It is these elements that define the bewildering number of different house styles. Artists include; Seamus Haji, Junior Jack, Stonebridge, Blvd East and many more.
House music : Styles
Acid house : A Chicago derivative built around the Roland TB-303 bassline machine. Hard, uncompromising, tweaking samples produce a hypnotic effect.
Ambient house : Mixing the moody atmospheric sounds of New Age and ambient music with pulsating house beats.Chicago house : Simple basslines, driving four-on-the-floor percussion and textured keyboard lines are the elements of the original house sound.
Deep house : A slower variant of house (around 120 BPM) with warm sometimes hypnotic melodies that originated in San Francisco.
Epic house : A variant of progressive house featuring lush synth-fills and dramatic (some would say pretentious) beat breakdowns.
Freestyle house : A Latin variant of NY house music, which began development in the early 1980s by producers like John Jellybean Benitez. Seen by some as an evolution of electro funk.
Garage : This term has changed meaning several times over the years. The UK definition relates to New York’s version of deep house, originally named after a certain style of soulful disco played at legendary club the Paradise Garage, although the original Garage sound was much more of an eclectic mix of many different kinds of records. The UK version is pronounced “ga-raaj”. May also be called the Jersey Sound due to the close connection many of its artists and producers have with New Jersey such as the legendary Shep Pettibone and Tony Humphries at Zanzibar in Newark, NJ. Not to be confused with speed garage or the British style nowadays called UKG pronounced “garridje”.
Ghetto house : A variation from Chicago that features minimal, 808 and 909 drum machine driven tracks, and profane (sometimes sexually explicit) lyrics.
Hip house : The simple fusion of rap rhymes with house beats. Mainly popular for a brief moment in the late 80s. Most famous record is Jungle Brothers “Girl I’ll House You.”
Hard house : House music on the harder side, leaning more towards aggressive ‘hoover’ type sounds. The style was generally fast tempo.
Hi-NRG : Called “high energy”. Popular in the gay scene, sometimes reminiscent of freestyle house.
Italo house : Slick production techniques, catchy melodies, rousing piano lines and American vocal styling typifies the Italian ("Italo") house sound. A modulating Giorgio Moroder style bassline is also a trademark of this style.
Latin House : Borrows heavily from Salsa and Brazilian beats, most notably in “ Brazil over Zurich.” This style was perfected and proliferated by DJ Reyna J in Chicago’s underground scene in the late 1990s.
Minimal House : (or Microhouse) Simple, 4/4 beats (usually around 125-130 beats-per-minute) usually only barely accompanied by sparse, percussive effects, synthesizer work, and simplistic vocals.
New York house : New York’s uptempo dance music, referred to simply as club music by some.
Pop house : The use of house production styles to make traditional pop artists more acceptable on the dancefloor results in the pop house phenomenon.
Progressive house : Progressive house is typified by accelerating peaks and troughs throughout a track’s duration, and are, in general, less obvious than in hard house. Layering different sound on top of each other and slowly bringing them in and out of the mix is a key idea behind the progressive movement. Some of this kind of music sounds like a cousin of trance music.
French house : A late 1990s house sound developed in France. Inspired by the ‘70s and ‘80s funk and disco sounds. Mostly features a typical sound “filter” effect. e.g. Daft Punk
Pumpin’ House : Developed in the late 90’s and related to French house, Pumpin’ House also often samples disco, rock, jazz, and/or funk loops (sometimes creating dense layered textures) and usually makes extensive use of filters, but gains its appellation from its heavy use of compression, which makes tracks surge and pulse. It is characterized by intense, up-front drum programming, heavy funk influence, and very emphasized basslines, often sampled from live players. Famous producers include Olav Basoski ( Holland), Grant Nelson ( UK), and Monkey Bars ( US). Typical BPM range is 127-133.
Sexy house : Sexy house draws its sounds from soul and funk with a 4/4 beat, and is sometimes confused with an acid jazz sound. Sexy house doesn’t feature as much synthesizer sounds (but does occasionally use cheesy 1980s synth samples) as other genres, but typically features horn sections, electric pianos and congas, but it is less jazzy or downtempo as trip-hop. Typical beats per minute are 125~128. The melody of this style is inspired from 1970s black soul and funk, and it features strong bass drum sound, with a softer higher frequencies. It is found played in bars and restaurants.
Tech house : Tech substitutes typical booming house kickdrums with shorter, often distorted kicks, smaller hi-hats, and noisier snares. House’s funky jazz loops are replaced with techno-sounding synth lines. Closely related to microhouse.
Tribal house : Popularized by remixer/DJ Junior Vasquez in New York, characterized by lots of percussion and world music style rhythms.
Ultra house : Extremely fast house beats typically 160 to 220 beats per minute, the same speed as “jungle” music.
Electro house : Sometimes resembles tech house, but often influenced by the “electro” sound of the early 1980’s, aka breakdancing music, via samples or just synthesizer usage.
Why don’t you check out our house styles in our new Large trakPacks produced by Loopmasters.
At the great price of $19.99, these Large trakPacks contain 100 loops in 10 bundles and are ideal for people looking to create their own mixes and royalty-free content for TV, Radio and Web advertisements, professional and home-made videos, podcasts, corporate and educational websites, telephone on-hold and game design.
The Large trakPacks includes house styles such as DiscoHouse, FunkyHouse, SoulfulHouse and ElektroHouse.
Reference: 3345.com
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Previous Comments
It’s a nice article. I haven’t known this different type of house music before. I should hear them live.
I think electro is really coming back in style, you can even hear it in recent hip hop production with Timbaland and Flo rida.
Its nice post don’t know much about home music will check now.Thanks for sharing.
Admiring the time and effort you put into your blog and detailed information you offer! I will bookmark your blog and have my children check up here often. Thumbs up!
Yes electro is really coming back in style, you can even hear it in recent hip hop production with Timbaland and Flo rida T-pain.
Couldn’t be written any better. Reading this post reminds me of my old room mate! He always kept talking about this. I will forward this article to him. Pretty sure he will have a good read. Thanks for sharing!
What an amazing post! I would like to thank you for sharing your thoughts. You are putting very good effort into the stuff you post. Keep up the good work
I’m getting into house music and I wondered what the different sub-genres there were, I know funky and soulful.. What exactly are they and what is jacking..
Love house music, will check it for sure. Thanks brah!
I find the different genres of house very confusing, however I’d like to hear more latin house and even some latin/jazz improvisation mixed into house beats. Workin’ on it…
i really like your blog its very nice information.
Nice article. It’s really interesting read for me.
I am looking for new tracks, remixes and so on,music i can play at clubs. I like house music the most. Any good sites with the newest releases and if possible,samples to hear a part?
I really like the content of this blog, so do keep posting and keep the good work up.
I never know about this house music. Thanks to let us know about the same.
Reading this post reminds me of my old room mate! He always kept talking about this. I will forward this article to him. Pretty sure he will have a good read. Thanks for sharing!
I agree with AZ Garage Door Repair - it’s far more commercial and ‘mainstream club’ orientated. I find the genres of house confuse me. I can really only clearly define House and Techno