House drums: the foundation

In house music, the drums are the heartbeat of the track. The steady four-to-the-floor dictates the pulse, and the clap/snare locks in the rhytm. All the other elements follow suit.

Since the drums are to important, they tend to be the first thing we create when we’re making a track. House drums are generally made using samples and loops:

• Kick
• Clap/snare
• Hi-hats & shakers
• Percussion & toms

Most popular drum kits

Back when house was invented, the producers relied heavily on the samples from drum machines that were popular at the time. These were the 808 and 909 drum kits.

Despite having access to thousands of drum samples, most of the drum sounds used by producers today are still the ones found in those original drum kits. This goes to show how incredibly versatile these machines were.

The 808 and 909 drum machines allowed you to manipulate a set of parameters for each hit, and these are still the ones we use when we create a house groove today:

• 1/16 notes, meaning the notes can start on every sixteenth part of the bar
• Volume, pitch, length and velocity control of each individual hit
• Shuffle presets that can easily be applied to individual patterns

Recommended: Sample Packs

Making the beat:

Take my advice here: a great beat starts with A-quality samples. It is much easier to turn something good into something great, than to start with a bunch of mediocre samples and apply endless EQ and processing to get something out of it.

You can use our site to find some very high quality sample packs.

Once you have your samples ready, let’s start by opening up a fresh instance of our DAW. In this case we’re using FL Studio, but you can use whatever you have.

Kickdrum & clap

The foundations are what we need to lay down first. We start by picking a nice fat kick drum with plenty of sub in it. You’ll need those frequencies later to make it work with a deep bass.

Here’s what we get after dialing in a G-note on beats 1, 2, 3 and 4:

Let’s add a clap to this beat. When you’re listening to house, the clap or snare is what accents the beat and keeps you locked into the rhytm:

This rhytm is good enough to move on and start adding other elements, but you can do a few things to make it more interesting. Have a listen to this example where we added another kick to accentuate the rhythm:

What this does is add a little bit of variety every 2 bars, which helps to keep the listener interested in our loop. It’s these little things to will carry your drums for a whole track.

These variations are usually added in a pattern thats 4, 8 or 16 bars long.

Note: You can also add some kick and clap loops from your sample packs to quickly get some fresh ideas on where to place these.

While this is a solid foundation, we can also add a tiny bit more groove by shifting the clap between 1 and 20 ms. When you move the clap so that it hits slightly early, this will give the loop more drive and the listener a sense of urgency:

Move the clap further from the middle to make it come in a little late, and this will give you a more laid-back beat instead.

Note: some sample packs come with pre-shifted claps, which are very useful if you want to experiment with different clap sounds

Hi-hats

With our foundation laid down, it’s time to add the next element. This is where we really start injecting that typical groovy house feeling into our beat with hihats, shakers and percussion.

Every track needs an off-beat hihat, so that’s what we put in first. We need to make a major decision here and decide whether we want to use an open hihat or a closed on for this. Let’s have a listen to both:

We choose to go with the open hihat:

It sounds pretty good, but this pattern will get boring fairly quickly. So in order to create a more interesting rhytm we need to add a few off-beat with 1/16th hits:

Mess around with these until you get the type of shuffle that you’re going for.

Percussion

Now that we have a good hi-hat pattern going, it’s time to add a few more frequencies to fill up the spectrum of our drumloop. Percussive textures are used to give the loop more interest.

We have to sprinkle them in in strategic positions where they accentuate the groove. You have two options here; the first is to just drop some samples in and start playing with pitch, timing, notes, length and velocity until you have something good.

The second method is using pre-made loops. Loops can be a great way to add groove to your drumtracks, but they often need pitch edits or splicing to work in your track.

I personally find that percussive loops from sample packs are rarely good enough to use as is. If you go this route, I highly recommend you get creative with them: combine multiple loops and patterns and/or chop them up to create new textures.

Groove & swing

While we have a very solid foundation now, we can still inject more groove into our loop. Genres like house, tech-house and techno rely heavily on humanized drums to keep the main loop from getting too boring and machine-like.

This is done by applying a swing to certain patterns, or by manually shifting elements a little off-center.

The clap is a great example to show you what we mean: move it slightly backwards so that it hits a little early, and this will drive the track forward and create a sense of urgency:

Move the clap forwards instead to make it come in a little late, and this will give you a more laid-back beat:

Notice how these elements are emphasized when we move them off the grid slightly? A human drummer naturally has these variations when he’s hitting the drums. We try to emulate this by moving our elements off-grid. This is called humanizing your drums.

Note: to move elements around in tiny steps, you have to find the snap-to-grid feature of your DAW and turn it off. In FL studio, this is achieved by holding Alt on your keyboard as you drag elements around the midi-roll.

To add even more groove, we can also apply swing or shuffle presets to other patterns in our drum beat. Essentially, applying a preset moves everything off-center as we did with our claps. The main difference is, here it’s done automatically according to a pre-made algorithm. The only thing you have to decide on is how much of the algorithm you want to apply.

This is especially useful for the hihats. Have a listen to these examples. The first is without swing, the second is with the swing preset applied:

Most DAWs have a swing setting that allows you to apply this effect at a certain amount. The higher the amount of shuffle, the more sense of urgency you’re adding to the pattern.

Processing the drums

We have layed down a strong foundation for a house track in this tutorial. The sounds are there, the main groove is dialed in.. what’s left is to take this loop to a higher quality by mixing down and processing all the individual elements, so that they come together as a cohesive drum loop.