House

House sits in the 118-128 BPM band with a kick on every beat, a clap or snare landing on 2 and 4, and open hi-hats on the off-beats — the four-on-the-floor pattern disco invented but house took apart and rebuilt around the drum machine. Synth bass lines tend to be punchy and repetitive, often built from a single one-bar pattern that loops for the whole track. Lead elements are usually an electric-piano riff, a synth stab, or a soul-leaning vocal looped into a hook rather than sung through. The Roland TR-909 and TR-808 drum machines, the TB-303 bass synth, and the Roland Juno-series polysynths shape almost every early house record.

House crystallised in Chicago between 1983 and 1985 around the DJ Frankie Knuckles at the Warehouse and the Music Box, with producers Jesse Saunders, Larry Heard, Marshall Jefferson, and Ron Hardy turning the disco DJ aesthetic into a studio practice using cheap drum machines and four-track tape. The earliest releases came out on Chicago labels DJ International and Trax in 1985-1987. New York and New Jersey carried it forward through Larry Levan's Paradise Garage and Tony Humphries, while a small UK contingent broke it into Europe with the 1987-1988 acid house wave and the second Summer of Love. From there it splintered: deep house in Chicago and New York, garage in New Jersey, hard house and progressive in the UK, and eventually French touch in mid-1990s Paris with Daft Punk and Cassius.

Lock on to the kick first — it really is on every beat with no variation, which is the whole point. The clap on 2 and 4 is usually a Roland 909 sample with a long tail; once you can hear it, you will hear it everywhere in dance music. Listen for the bass line and notice how short it is — often just one or two bars looped — and how the variation comes from filters opening and closing rather than the notes changing. Vocal house tracks usually loop a short phrase as a hook rather than running through full verses.

For the Chicago starting point, Frankie Knuckles, 'Your Love' (1987), co-produced with Jamie Principle. For deep house, Larry Heard (as Mr. Fingers), 'Can You Feel It' (1986). For a recent pop-facing reference, Disclosure, 'Latch' (2012) with Sam Smith.

The genre's name comes from the Warehouse, the Chicago club where Frankie Knuckles DJed — a local record store, Importes Etc., labelled a sales rack 'Warehouse music' for tracks people had heard there, and the shorter 'house music' caught on as a category.