House Music Club Dance or Electronic Dance music are umbrella terms for an extremely wide variety of musical

terms which have grown up with the development of synthesizers, drum machines and digital sampling and recording technologies since the late seventies/early eighties. These styles have a complex musical ancestry and the history of their development can be hard to trace. Broadly speaking however, club dance music developed from House music, which, in turn, came from two main influences disco and electronic music. Disco was an amalgam of funk and Philly soul and was the prominent nightclub music of the seventies in other words it was developed primarily for dancing to. The tempo and drumming styles of disco records have influenced a number of Dance music styles but the most important aspect of Discos influence is that in heralded an era when the DJ and sound system would replace live music in clubs. The partnership between singer Donna Summer and Italian producer Giorgio Moroder is worthy of mention here. Moroder was asked to create an extended club mix of their 1975 hit Love to Love You Baby. The resulting 17 minute version with its lush strings and sexually charged vocal mark it out as an important forerunner to the dance music of the 80s and 90s. Summer and Moroder produced another seminal disco track, I Feel Love. This song is perhaps even more of a blueprint for house and techno because of its use of synth bassline, programmed drums and processed vocal Chicago House In the early eighties a DJ named Frankie Knuckles playing funk, soul and disco at Chicagos The Warehouse nightclub began using a Roland TR-909 drum machine to thicken up the four-on-the-floor kick drum patterns of the disco tracks. Knuckles also edited reel-to-reel tapes to augment and extend the tracks he was playing. As this innovative DJing approach developed, the new genre Frankie Knuckles was pioneering became known as House music after the Warehouse club itself. Garage Meanwhile in Detroit and New York, two contemporaries of Frankie Knuckles were developing influential club styles of their own. New York DJ Larry Levan developed a more melodic, piano-led style of House known as Garage (named after the Paradise Garage nightclub). This style was more soulful and gospel influenced than the sparse Chicago style.

Techno The three individuals most closely associated with the birth of Detroit techno as a genre are Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson and Derrick May, also known as the "Belleville Three". Producers in Detroit and Chicago at the time used the same hardware and even collaborated on projects and remixes together, but the Detroiters traded the soulful vocals of House for metallic clicks, robotic voices and repetitive hooks reminiscent of an automotive assembly line. Many of the early techno tracks had futuristic or robotic themes, although a notable exception to this trend was a single by Derrick May under his pseudonym Rhythm Is Rhythm, called Strings of Life. This vibrant dancefloor anthem was filled with rich synthetic string arrangements and took the underground music scene by storm in May 1987. European electronic band Kraftwerk is cited as a major influence on Detroit Techno. Musical Characteristics of House House is uptempo music for dancing, although by modern dance-music standards it is mid-tempo, generally ranging between 118 and 135 bpm. Tempos tended to be slower in the early years of house. The common element of house is a prominent kick drum on every beat (also known as a four-on-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 hi-hat cymbal-patterns that nearly always include a hi-hat on quaver off-beats between each kick, and a snare drum or clap sound on beats two and four of every bar. This pattern derives from socalled "four-on-the-floor" dance drumbeats of the 1960s and especially from the 1970s disco drummers. Producers commonly layer sampled drum sounds to achieve a more complex sound. Producers use many different sound-sources for bass sounds in house, from continuous, repeating electronically generated lines sequenced on a synthesizer, such as a Roland SH-101 or TB-303, to studio recordings or samples of live electric bassists, or simply filtered-down samples from whole stereo recordings of classic funk tracks or any other songs. House bass-lines tend to favor notes that fall within a single-octave range, whereas disco bass-lines often alternated between octave-separated notes and would span greater ranges. Some early house productions used parts of bass lines from earlier disco tracks. For example, producer Mark "Hot Rod" Trollan copied bass-line sections from the 1983 Italo disco song "Feels Good (Carrots & Beets)" (by Electra featuring Tara Butler) to form the basis of his 1986 production of "Your Love" by Jamie Principle. Frankie Knuckles used the same notes in his more famous 1987 version of "Your Love", which also featured Principle on vocals. Electronically generated sounds and samples of recordings from genres such as jazz, blues, disco, funk, soul and synth pop are often added to the foundation of the drum beat and synth bass line. House songs may also include disco, soul, or

gospel vocals and additional percussion such as tambourine. Many house mixes also include repeating, short, syncopated, staccato chord-loops.