House: four on the floor, an off-beat bass, organ stabs and a vocal-style hook

Take the loop apart

Press Play and let the eight bars loop. Each row is one track of an Ensemble Set: Drums on T1, Bass on T2, Stabs on T3 and Hook on T4. All four parts are original MIDI written for this lesson, played live in your browser by the Ensemble instrument, so every sound comes from a device you can open and change.

The sections below follow the loop one layer at a time. Solo and mute the parts as you read. Edit sound opens a part's Ensemble editor on this page: turn a knob while the loop plays, or play the keys while it is stopped. Reload the page to get the lesson's settings back.

1. Four on the floor

Solo Drums. The kick lands on all four beats of every bar and never changes; that relentless pulse is the first thing that makes a track sound like house. A clap marks beats 2 and 4, so the bar still has a backbeat on top of the steady kick.

Listen between the kicks: an open hi-hat hisses on every off-beat, the “and” of each beat. A short closed hat sits one sixteenth before each open hat, and the next closed hat three sixteenths later shuts it, just as a drummer's foot would close the cymbals (the Drum engine chokes a ringing open hat when a closed hat plays). Off-beat hat against on-beat kick is half of house's bounce. A rim click adds syncopated sixteenths on top.

Every second bar answers the first: a rim hit moves, a conga joins on three syncopated sixteenths and a soft clap on the last sixteenth leans into the next bar. In bar 8 the clap, rim and conga stop on the last beat, and four claps rise in volume over the kick: a short roll into bar 1. The off-beat sixteenths are written a tenth of a sixteenth late, a light 55 % swing, while the kick stays exactly on the grid.

2. Kick and bass take turns

Solo Bass and notice that it never plays on the beat. It hits the chord's root on the “and” of beats 1, 2 and 3, then jumps up an octave on the “and” of 4. Bring the drums back and the two lock together: boom, bass, boom, bass. The kick owns the beat and the bass owns the off-beat, so neither one masks the other.

Each bar ends with one short note on the last sixteenth that steers into the next bar. Most of the time it is a step below the next root, but at the end of bars 4 and 8 the bass plays E, a half step under F, so the loop slides back home to F minor.

3. Jazzy chord stabs

Add Stabs. The harmony moves slowly, two bars per chord in the first half:

• Bars 1–4: i9 – i9 – iv9 – iv9 (F minor 9 – F minor 9 – B♭ minor 9 – B♭ minor 9)
• Bars 5–8: i9 – i9 – VImaj7 – VII (F minor 9 – F minor 9 – D♭ major 7 – E♭ with an added 9th)

Roman numerals name each chord by the scale step it is built on: lower case for minor chords, upper case for major ones. The extra numbers add colour notes: a ninth on the minor chords, a major seventh on the D♭ chord. These rich minor-seventh and ninth chords come from soul, jazz and gospel, and they give house its warm, slightly melancholy feel.

The organ plays the chords without their roots, in the middle of the keyboard, because the bass already supplies them. Look closely at bars 3–4 and bar 7: the organ plays exactly the same four keys, A♭, C, D♭ and F. Over a B♭ in the bass they sound like B♭ minor 9; over a D♭ they become D♭ major 7. The stabs hit off-beats and sixteenths in a different pattern every other bar, so the chords bounce against the kick instead of sitting on it.

4. A hook you can chant

Add Hook. It stays mostly on the F minor pentatonic scale, with a G borrowed from the E♭ chord in bar 8. It is a two-bar phrase: a rising call that starts just before beat 2, and an answer that falls back down. The phrase repeats with only its last note changed, and in bars 7 and 8 it reaches higher over the D♭ and E♭ chords.

Repeating one small idea and letting the groove carry it is a house habit, borrowed from the gospel and soul singers whose lines DJs looped on the dance floor. The hook stays in a singer's range, F4 to A♭5, and its echoes from the shared delay fill the gaps between phrases.

5. The sounds

Each part starts from an Ensemble factory sound with a few values changed for this arrangement. Edit sound shows every one, and the same project opens in the DAW. A value written as 40/127 is the knob's stored number on a 0–127 scale; the editor's display may show it converted, for example as a percentage or a time.

Drums (T1): the Drum engine

The DRUM KIT sound on the Drum engine, switched to KIT 10: a compact kit with a kick that starts near 90 Hz and drops, a noise snare, widely spaced claps with a long tail and metallic square-wave hats, close to the classic house drum machine. TUNE, TONE and SNAP stay centred at 64/127, DECY is 60/127 and DRV 0/127. Notes follow the General MIDI drum map: 36 kick, 37 rim, 39 clap, 42 closed hat, 46 open hat, 62 conga. A small reverb send (REV 15/127) puts the claps in a room.

Bass (T2): Duo, sine sub

SUB BASS runs the Duo engine on a sine wave: a deep, round tone you feel more than hear. The filter is low (CUT 40/127) with no resonance, and DRV 20/127 adds a few harmonics so the bass is still audible on small speakers. The voice mode is MONO instead of the preset's LEG, so each off-beat note starts cleanly, and every send is at zero: the low end stays dry and centred.

Stabs (T3): Wheel, a percussive organ

JAZZ PERC on the Wheel engine is a tonewheel organ. The 3BAR registration uses three drawbars, PERC 3RD adds a short click of the third harmonic at the start of each chord, CLICK 50/127 gives the key contact some bite and DRV 8/127 a little warmth. The rotary speaker turns slowly (ROTR SLOW). Sends go up to CHO 20/127, DLY 20/127 and REV 35/127, and an EQ Eight after the instrument cuts everything below 150 Hz, so the organ leaves the low end to the bass.

Hook (T4): Voice, a vowel synth

VOX LEAD on the Voice engine shapes a buzzing source (BUZZ 90/127, a little breath at BRTH 8/127) with vowel formants (VOWL 32/127, Q 72/127) and shifts the formants up two semitones (SHIFT +2), so it sounds like a sung vowel rather than a synth. The LEG voice mode with a short glide (GLD 6/127) joins connected notes like a singer. Sends of DLY 45/127 and REV 40/127 give it space.

6. Pump and space

The bass and the stabs each run through a Compressor whose sidechain listens to T1, the drums. Its sidechain EQ is a low-pass at 100 Hz, so only the kick, not the hats, triggers it: every kick pushes the bass and the chords down for a moment and they swell back up in between (ratio 4:1 on the bass, a gentler 3:1 on the stabs, 1 ms attack, 100 ms release). Turn a compressor off in the DAW and the loop gets flatter and muddier; this breathing is the pump of house.

All four parts share the set's returns. The reverb is a ROOM with SIZE 70/127 and DAMP 70/127: short and dark, so claps, stabs and hook sound like one small club rather than a hall. The delay repeats in dotted eighths (1/8D) with feedback 45/127, mostly on the hook, and the chorus runs slowly (CRT 40/127, CDP 50/127). On the master, LOWCUT stays OFF and MASTER is lowered to 112/127 for headroom.

Try this in the DAW

Open in the DAW loads this exact project into the browser studio, with the Hook track selected, armed and open in its Ensemble editor: play the on-screen keys or your computer keyboard to try your own hook over the loop. Then try these three changes:

1. Filter house: put an Auto Filter (low-pass) on T3 and automate its cutoff from 300 Hz up to fully open over eight bars, then back down. That sweep is the classic build-up and breakdown move of French and filter house.
2. Deep house keys: load the FM6 TINE EP sound on T3, lengthen every stab to three quarters of a beat and raise the reverb send to 60/127. The same chords turn warm, soft and deep.
3. Acid line: load the Duo ACID sound on T2, set the voice mode to LEG, raise RES to 100/127 and let two notes in each bar overlap so they slide into each other. Turn CUT while the loop plays and you have the squelch of Chicago acid house.

Your edits stay in that temporary project. They do not change this page.