House and EDM
Four on the floor, and everything else is arranged around it. The kick on every beat is not a stylistic preference but the frame the entire genre hangs on, and almost nothing in the core of the style breaks it.
- 4 on the floor
- Dorian
- 120 to 128 bpm
In which styles
- House
- Deep house
- EDM
- Disco
In short
Deep house grew out of Chicago house around 1985 and 1986 with the harmony of jazz-funk and soul brought into it, which is why it has seventh and ninth chords where most dance music has none. The rest of the family keeps the harmony minimal and puts the development in filters, layers and arrangement.
Hypnotic rather than dramatic. The pleasure is in small changes over long stretches, not in events.
How the style works
Three scales do nearly all the work, and Dorian is the signature of deep house: natural minor with a major sixth instead of a minor one. That one half step is the difference between sad and soulful, and it is why the major IV keeps appearing.
Where you run into this
- A kick on every beat with an offbeat hi-hat between
- A sixteen-bar stretch where only the filter changes
- A chord stab that lands on the offbeat and never on the one
What you leave out
A drummer playing fills. The power of the groove is in the immovability of the kick, and a tom roll leading into the next section is exactly the rock instinct that does not belong here.