Tribal House

What it is

Hand percussion stops being decoration here and becomes the main rhythmic content instead. It came out of New York, largely through Danny Tenaglia and the Twisted and Tribal America catalogues, and it was built for very long sets in dark rooms. The kit gets stripped back so the congas and toms have somewhere to sit, the backbeat often disappears from beat 4 entirely, and the arrangement moves by adding and removing percussion layers over ten minutes rather than by changing anything harmonic. Latin house is the neighbouring style with the same instruments and a much stronger song underneath them.

What it sounds like

Dry, dense and dark. Congas and bongos playing sixteenth figures that resolve over two bars rather than one, a kick with a lot of body and no click, and almost no hi-hat. Where there is a vocal it is a chant or a spoken sample rather than a sung line. Filters open and close over very long spans, and a single tom fill can be the largest event in three minutes of music.

Key elements

• Congas as the lead partThe conga figure carries the melody of the groove. It gets written first and the rest of the kit gets written around it.
• A missing backbeatClap on 2, nothing on 4. The conga takes beat 4 instead, and the bar stops being symmetrical, which is most of why it hypnotises.
• Sparse hatsOne quiet closed hat on the e of each beat and an open hat on the and of 2 and 4. That is the entire hi-hat part in the track.
• Two bar percussion phrasesThe conga pattern resolves over two bars rather than one, so the loop is twice as long as it sounds on first listen.
• Long filter movementA low-pass across the whole percussion bus moving over thirty two bars. That movement is how the arrangement develops.

How to get them

• Write the congas firstProgram the conga part on its own with no kick under it, until it works as a rhythm by itself. Then put the kick in and see what still fits.
• Two conga soundsAn open tone and a slap, at different pitches, panned slightly apart. One sample playing everything sounds like a preset and always will.
• KickLong, round, tuned low, with no click. It has to sit under a great deal of midrange percussion without competing with any of it.
• HatsKeep everything except the open hats under velocity 50. If you can pick the closed hats out of the mix, there are too many of them.
• TomsOne descending tom fill every thirty two bars, and nowhere else. Scarcity is the only thing that makes a fill land in music this repetitive.
• Compress the percussion busEverything except the kick into a single compressor at about 3 to 1, so the congas breathe together as one instrument instead of as six loops.

Reference points

Danny Tenaglia, Junior Vasquez, Peter Rauhofer, DJ Vibe, and the Twisted and Tribal America catalogues. Named as reference points for the sound, not as endorsements.