House Drum Patterns

We’re going to look at five different house drum patterns here. All built with packs that come with Ableton Live Suite. The midi is available for each, so you can download it and load it up on your own drum kits.

See also: All our drum pattern guides including UK Garage Drum Pattern, M1 House Organ Ableton Tutorial, Techno Drum Patterns, Hip Hop Drum Patterns, Drum And Bass Drum Patterns, Dub Techno Tutorial: 4 Ingredients, Studio Brootle 909 Sample Pack, Studio Brootle 808 Sample Pack, Free Techno Kick Sample Pack.

You can also find our paid packs at our Shopify store —> here.

House Drum Patterns

These are the house drum patterns we’re making using native Ableton kits and standard effects:

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Here’s how we made these house drum patterns in Live….

Simple 707 House Drum Pattern

I love the Roland TR-707, it’s great for house and techno a-like. We’re making a simple skippy, shuffled 707 house groove with hats playing off each other and a tom filling out the bass frequencies. This is the loop we made:

How we made it….. we used the drum kit: 707 Core Kit that comes with Live. Set the BPM to 126bpm.

We then added shuffle using the swing setting: MPC 16 Swing-75.agr (set at 25%). This groove is one included in the groove pool. you can see the settings below:

You can download the midi clip here to load into Ableton with the drums all programmed for you:

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Swung 909 House Drum Pattern

Possibly the most used drum machine of all time, the Roland TR-909, used in a huge amount of house tracks, it would be rude not to include it here. We use a shuffle and make this beat…

We used the ‘909 Core’ Kit that comes with Live, set the BPM to 126bpm, and shuffled using the swing setting: MPC 16 Swing-75.agr (set at 25%).

Then we set up this midi pattern:

You can download it here and load it into Ableton:

The only thing other than this we did was to add an Overdrive unit, with low wet/dry settings and slight drive:

The slight overdrive and shuffle give it that sampled feel, like it was made in an MPC. Well almost anyway!

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Weird Punchy House Banger

Here we set up a weird but punchy beat using the Ichor Kit. Set at 126bpm with no swing. It sounds like this…

The midi pattern we used was this:

Or you can download it here:

I added some delay to one of the cymbals, I make the left and right channels of the delay a little bit (2%) out of time with each other for some stereo width.

Also I added a ‘Drum Buss’ effect unit (there is already one in the rack of the Ichor Kit, but I added another for more crunch and boom).

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Jazz Sampled House Pattern

This sounds like a jazz-sampling MPC beat with it’s live rides and drums sampled from a kit. We set the bpm to 126bpm and shuffled using the swing setting: MPC 16 Swing-75.agr (set at 25%). We used the Battu Kit which has live drum samples.

We set up this midi pattern…

…which you can download here

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606 Core Trax Drum Pattern

The Roland TR-606 was an acid house staple, and is still used today for good reason. There is such demand, hardware clones are being re-produced too. We made the beat here using the ‘606 Core’ kit…

It’s a simple beat using this midi…

…which you can download here:

Its at 126bpm with no swing. And we processed it with extra Drum Buss as per this image:

The drum buss is a great unit that adds drive, bass weight and can accentuate (or de-accentuate) transients.

Summary

Hope you found these useful, feel free to download the midi files above and load them into any kit you want. Edit them, change them. Let us hear what you make…

You might also like our other articles on beats and percussion… techno rumble kick, techno ride cymbal, some free techno kicks, and a Dance Mania influenced beat we made.