Dutch House

What it is

Every one of these records has the same tom sample on it. Around 2009 a group of producers in and around Amsterdam and Rotterdam, Afrojack and Chuckie and Sidney Samson and the Bingo Players among them, worked out two things at once. A tuned tom playing a melodic figure could replace the hi-hat entirely, and a thin detuned saw squeezed through a high-pass sounded enormous on a festival system precisely because it had no low end left to fight the kick. Chuckie called the strand dirty house. The tom fills went everywhere after that: into moombahton, into Melbourne bounce, into the whole vocabulary of the following decade. The kick and hat programming underneath is borrowed wholesale from trance, and there is no point pretending otherwise.

What it sounds like

The tom is the top end. A closed hat marks the four beats and plays nothing between them, an open hat sits on the offbeats doing exactly what it does in trance, and a melodic tom line fills everything else and rolls into every transition. The kick is dry with the sub scooped out below 45Hz, because the bass takes that space. The lead is a stack of detuned saws high-passed near 400Hz with portamento on, played as a two note squeal rather than as a tune. Claps are layered three deep with a lot of room behind them. Almost nothing here gets any reverb at all.

Key elements

• The tom lineA tuned tom playing a figure rather than a fill, and then a six sixteenth roll climbing from 64 to 112 across the end of bar two. It occupies the space a hi-hat pattern would.
• Closed hat on the beats onlyFour quiet hits on the quarter notes in bar one at 62 to 66, and three in bar two once the roll takes over. There is no sixteenth hat activity anywhere, which is what leaves room for the toms.
• The kettle leadTwo or three detuned saws high-passed at 400Hz with portamento between two notes. It has no bottom at all, which is exactly why it can be as loud as it is.
• A scooped kickPunch at 80Hz and a hole below 45Hz. The sub-bass lives in that hole, and on a large system the two of them read as one sound.
• Kick removal for the fillBeat four of bar two carries no kick. The tom roll takes the whole beat, and that is how a record of this kind gets from one eight bar block to the next.

How to get them

• TomsTake one tom sample, tune three copies of it a fourth apart, and program a figure rather than a fill. Compress them together on a bus at 4 to 1 so the roll swells instead of thinning out.
• KickShort and dry, peak around 80Hz, high-passed at 45Hz. It should sound thin soloed. On a big system the bass fills in underneath and the pair together is what carries the room.
• LeadThree saws detuned about 18 cents, high-pass at 400Hz, portamento near 60ms, and one band-pass sweep automated across four bars. Two notes is enough for an entire record.
• ClapThree claps at slightly different offsets into a 1.2 second room, then gate the room to 300ms. That width is what lets a two note lead sound like an arrangement.
• Program the roll by handSix sixteenths from 64 up to 112, no two velocities the same. A roll drawn as a straight ramp sounds like a drum machine demo, and this one has to sound played.
• Own the resemblanceThe drum grid here is trance furniture at house tempo. Do not try to disguise it with extra percussion. The toms and the lead are what make the record, so spend the hours there instead.

Reference points

Afrojack, Chuckie, Sidney Samson, Bingo Players, Laidback Luke, and the Wall and Dirty Dutch catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.