French House
One bar of a disco record, opened and closed with a filter.
The pattern
1 bar, sixteenth notes. Loops until you stop it.
Sixteen steps and dead straight, which is the whole point: the sample brings the swing. Kick on all four at 120, clap on 2 and 4 at 110, and closed hats on every sixteenth with the and of each beat at 88 against 42 on the e and the a and 58 on the beat itself. That accent is the hat part in its entirety. One open hat sits on the last offbeat with the closed hat removed from that step so nothing chokes, and a quiet sixteenth at 44 leads back into the top of the bar.
What it is
Filter house is what Paris did with the same disco records in the middle nineties, and it is one idea taken very seriously: loop a bar, run it through a resonant filter, and automate that filter across sixteen or thirty two bars. The automation is the arrangement. Daft Punk, Cassius, Alan Braxe, Stardust and Modjo built careers on it, and Bob Sinclar and the wider funky house strand did the same thing with a lighter touch a few years later. The reason the drums here are straight is worth knowing: the loop already swings, because a session drummer played it in 1977, and machine swing on top of that fights the sample rather than joining it.
What it sounds like
A single phrase, heard over and over at different filter positions. Because the source is a full band recording, one loop carries bass, chords, guitar and horns at once, and moving the filter changes which of those you are hearing. Underneath it: a hard clean kick, a clap, and hats in sixteenths with a big accent on the and of each beat. The whole mix is compressed heavily, so the loop breathes in and out against the kick.
Key elements
- One loop, filteredA single bar from a disco record, band-passed and automated. Whatever the arrangement does over four minutes, the filter is what does it.
- Straight sixteenthsNo swing at all. The sample brings its own feel, and adding machine shuffle on top turns the whole thing to mud.
- The offbeat hat accentClosed hats on all sixteen sixteenths, with the and of each beat at roughly double the velocity of everything around it.
- Heavy bus compressionThe loop ducking against the kick, done with a compressor across the whole mix rather than with a sidechain on one channel. It is a different sound from a modern pump.
- A phaser or a flangerOn the loop, moving slowly. Used alongside the filter it makes one bar sound like it is developing when nothing has actually changed.
How to get them
- Pick the loopOne bar, with the whole band playing. Pitch it up two or three semitones rather than time-stretching, which is what these records did and part of why they sound so bright.
- FilterA resonant low-pass with the resonance high enough to sing, automated over sixteen bars from about 400Hz to fully open. Draw it by hand rather than using an LFO, so it breathes unevenly.
- KickClean, modern, tuned to the sample. It has to cut through a full band recording, so give it a click above 2kHz as well as weight underneath.
- CompressionA bus compressor over the loop and the kick together, ratio around 4 to 1, attack slow enough to let the kick transient past and release timed to recover by the next beat.
- HatsSixteenths at velocity 42 with the offbeats at 88 and the downbeats at 58. That one accent pattern is most of the groove and it does not want swing on top of it.
- Leave swing at zeroSet the groove straight and move the sample by a few milliseconds instead if it fights the grid. Nudging the audio is the right fix here, not shuffling the drums.
Reference points
Daft Punk, Cassius, Alan Braxe, Stardust, Modjo, and the Roule and Crydamoure labels. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.
The pattern is a starting point rather than a rule. If you want the theory underneath why any of it works, Battuto measures it.