Four-on-the-Floor: House and Techno Patterns

Four-on-the-floor means a kick on every beat of a 4/4 bar. It is the foundation of house, techno, disco and most dance pop, usually somewhere between 118 and 135 BPM. The kick is fixed, so all of the character comes from what you place around it.

The 16-step grid

One bar of 4/4 split into 16th notes gives 16 steps. Beats fall on steps 1, 5, 9 and 13. The "and" of each beat (the off-beat 8th) falls on 3, 7, 11 and 15. Every pattern in this lesson is written on that grid, with x for a hit and . for a rest.

Step:   1 . . . 5 . . . 9 . . . 13. . .
Beat:   1       2       3       4

The core house pattern

Kick    x . . . x . . . x . . . x . . .
Clap    . . . . x . . . . . . . x . . .
OpenHat . . x . . . x . . . x . . . x .

Kick on every beat, clap on beats 2 and 4 (steps 5 and 13), and an open hat on every off-beat (3, 7, 11, 15). That off-beat hat is what makes house "pump": the kick pushes down, the hat answers in between. Choke the open hat so it cuts off before the next kick, or the tails will smear into the low end.

Adding the 16th shuffle

Add closed hats on the in-between 16ths for movement:

ClHat   . x . x . x . x . x . x . x . x

Turn these down well below the open hats, roughly 30–50% of full velocity, so they are felt more than heard. Shakers often replace them in deeper house.

The core techno pattern

Techno uses the same kick but tends to drop the clap on 2 and 4, or play it very quietly, and leans on hats, rides and percussion for drive:

Kick    x . . . x . . . x . . . x . . .
OpenHat . . x . . . x . . . x . . . x .
ClHat   x x . x x x . x x x . x x x . x
Ride    . . x . . . x . . . x . . . x .
Rim     . . . . . . . x . . . . . . x .

A few principles separate techno from house:

• The kick is louder and longer, often with a rumble tail at a low tempo-synced decay, and the bass sits around it rather than on top.
• Percussion is syncopated. Rims, toms or claps land on off-grid steps like 7, 11 or 15 rather than the backbeat.
• Change happens slowly. Instead of new parts every 8 bars, techno changes filter cutoffs, hat decays and percussion density gradually over 16 or 32 bars.

Variations that keep the loop alive

A one-bar pattern repeated for five minutes gets tiring. Common fixes, in rough order of subtlety:

1. Ghost kicks. A quiet kick on step 15 or 16 at the end of every fourth bar acts as a pickup into the next phrase.
2. Drop a kick. Removing the kick on beat 4 of bar 8 (step 13) creates a gap that makes the downbeat of the next phrase hit harder.
3. Open the hat. Lengthen the open hat's decay over 16 bars, then snap it short at the drop.
4. Two-bar percussion. Write the percussion over two bars instead of one so the pattern repeats less obviously.
5. Fills every 8 or 16 bars, not every 4. Dance music phrases in 8s and 16s, and DJs count them.

Getting the kick and clap to sit

The clap on 2 and 4 lands on top of a kick. If both have energy in the 150–250 Hz range they stack up and the beat gets boxy. High-pass the clap around 200 Hz or choose a thinner clap. The kick owns the low end; nothing else in the drum group needs content below about 100 Hz.

Tempo guide

Style	Typical BPM
Deep house	118–124
House / tech house	122–128
Techno	125–140
Hard techno	140–155

Use the online metronome or the tap BPM counter on a reference track to find the right tempo before you start.