Styles of house

Acid house

A Chicago derivative built around the Roland TB-303 bassline machine. Hard, uncompromising, tweaking samples produce a hypnotic effect.

Ambient house

Mixing the moody atmospheric sounds of New Age and ambient music with pulsating house beats.

Chicago house

Simple basslines, driving four-on-the-floor percussion and textured keyboard lines are the elements of the original house sound.

Deep house

A slower variant of house (around 120 BPM) with warm sometimes hypnotic melodies that originated in San Francisco.

Epic house

A variant of progressive house featuring lush synth-fills and dramatic (some would say pretentious) beat breakdowns.

Freestyle house

A latin variant of NY house music, which began development in the early 1980s by producers like John Jellybean Benitez.

French house

A late 1990s house sound developed in France. Inspired by the '70s and '80s funk and disco sounds. Mostly features a typical sound "filter" effect.

Ghetto house

A variation from Chicago that features minimal, 808 and 909 drum machine driven tracks, and profane (sometimes sexually explicit) lyrics.

Hip house

The simple fusion of rap rhymes with house beats.

Hard house

House music on the harder side, leaning more towards aggressive 'hoover' type sounds. The style was generally fast tempo.

Hi-Nrg

Called "high energy". Popular in the gay scene.

Italo house

Slick production techniques, catchy melodies, rousing piano lines and American vocal styling typifies the Italian ("Italo") house sound.

Minimal House

(or Microhouse) Simple, 4/4 beats (usually around 125-130 beats-per-minute) usually only barely accompanied by sparse, percussive effects, synthesizer work, and simplistic vocals.

New York house

New York's uptempo dance music, referred to simply as club music by some.

Pop house

The use of house production styles to make traditional pop artists more acceptable on the dancefloor results in the pop house phenomenon.

Progressive house

Progressive house is typified by accelerating peaks and troughs throughout a track's duration, and are, in general, less obvious than in hard house. Layering different sound on top of each other and slowly bringing them in and out of the mix is a key idea behind the progressive movement.

Sexy house:

Sexy house draws its sounds from soul and funk with a 4/4 beat, and is sometimes confused with an acid jazz sound. Sexy house doesn't feature as much synthesizer sounds (but does occasionally use cheesy 1980s synth samples) as other genres, but typically features horn sections, electric pianos and congas, but it is less jazzy or downtempo as trip-hop. Typical beats per minute are 125~128. The melody of this style is inspired from 1970s black soul and funk, and it features strong bass drum sound, with a softer higher frequencies. It is found played in bars and restaurants.

Tech house

Tech substitutes typical booming house kickdrums with shorter, often distorted kicks, smaller hi-hats, and noisier snares. House's funky jazz loops are replaced with techno-sounding synth lines.

Tribal house

Popularized by remixer/DJ Junior Vasquez in New York.

Ultra house

Extremely fast house beats typically 160 to 220 beats per minute, the same speed as "jungle" music