How to make electronic music: BPM, drops and hooks

Electronic dance music runs on a grid: pick a tempo, build the track in blocks of 8 bars, take things away to raise the tension and bring them back in the drop. The hook can be a vocal line, a synth riff or a bassline, as long as someone can hum it on the way home. That, in short, is how to make electronic music people come back to. The electronic hooks on Vibnelo are listed below.

From disco to EDM: where dance music comes from

Disco, 1970s. The four-on-the-floor kick, a kick drum on every beat with open hi-hats in between, comes from disco. Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” (1977), produced by Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, put that pulse on a backing made almost entirely on a Moog synthesizer.

Chicago house, early 1980s. DJs such as Frankie Knuckles at the Warehouse, the club that gave house its name, stretched disco with drum machines like the Roland TR-808 and TR-909. Jesse Saunders’ “On and On” (1984) is often called the first house record, and Phuture’s “Acid Tracks” (1987) added the squelch of a Roland TB-303.

Detroit techno, mid-1980s. Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, the Belleville Three, took cues from Kraftwerk and funk and made something colder and more futuristic. Listen to Model 500’s “No UFO’s” (1985) and Rhythim Is Rhythim’s “Strings of Life” (1987).

UK rave, jungle and drum & bass, late 1980s–1990s. Acid house exploded in Britain in 1988 and grew into rave. Producers sped up breakbeats, above all the “Amen” break from the Winstons’ 1969 track “Amen, Brother”, put deep sub-bass under them and got jungle; by the mid-1990s it had become drum & bass. Start with Goldie’s “Inner City Life” (1994) and Roni Size/Reprazent’s “New Forms”, which won the 1997 Mercury Prize.

Dubstep and EDM, 2000s–2010s. Dubstep grew out of South London in the early 2000s (Skream, Benga, Digital Mystikz). Around 2010, “EDM” became the American umbrella name for festival-sized dance music built around the drop, such as Avicii’s “Levels” (2011).

BPM by style: house, techno, drum & bass, dubstep

• House, about 120–128 BPM: four-on-the-floor kick, open hi-hats on the offbeats, a clap or snare on 2 and 4, and the swing of disco and soul.
• Techno, about 125–140: the same pulse with more machine and less song, built on loops that change slowly through sound design.
• Drum & bass, about 170–175: fast broken beats over deep sub-bass, with the snare on 2 and 4.
• Dubstep, about 140: half-time drums with the snare on beat 3, so it feels like 70 and leaves room for the bass.

At 128 BPM a bar lasts 1.875 seconds, so 8 bars take 15 seconds and 16 bars exactly 30; at 174 BPM, 16 bars pass in about 22 seconds. Slower pop borrows these sounds too, with soft 808s and synth pads: see late-night pop.

Build-ups and drops

A drop hits only as hard as the build made you wait for it. The usual tools, over 8 or 16 bars:

• A snare or clap roll that doubles its speed: quarter notes, eighths, then sixteenths.
• A white-noise riser and a climbing pitch.
• A low-pass filter opening on the chords, or a high-pass filter thinning the whole mix.
• Kick and bass taken out, so the low end is missing until the drop.
• A beat of silence, or the vocal alone, just before the drop.

The drop is where the hook lives: the full kick and bass with one lead idea, a synth riff, a chopped vocal or a bass phrase. Keep it to one idea people can recognise in two seconds; if it needs explaining, it is two drops. In a dance track the drop is often the part people remember, so finding the hook in your song often means finding the drop.

Arrange in 8-, 16- and 32-bar blocks

Dance music moves in 8-bar phrases, and DJs mix phrase to phrase. Change one element every 8 bars and save the big changes for 16 or 32. A club-friendly layout:

1. Intro: 16 or 32 bars of drums, so a DJ can mix in.
2. Build: 8 or 16 bars.
3. Drop 1: 16 or 32 bars.
4. Breakdown: 16 bars of chords and vocal, without the kick.
5. Build: 8 or 16 bars.
6. Drop 2: 16 or 32 bars, with one new element.
7. Outro: 16 or 32 bars of drums for the next mix.

For a radio or streaming edit, cut the intro to 4 or 8 bars and bring the vocal in early.

The hook: sound design and the vocal topline

Sound design basics. Most synth sounds start with an oscillator: a saw for bright leads, a square for hollow ones, a sine for sub-bass. A filter shapes the brightness, an envelope (attack, decay, sustain, release) shapes how each note starts and fades, and an LFO moves something over time; a dubstep wobble is an LFO on a filter.

Stack detuned saws for a festival lead, keep the sub-bass a mono sine below about 100 Hz, and sidechain the bass and pads to the kick so the track pumps. Detuned saws on a bass make a Reese, a drum & bass staple named after Kevin Saunderson’s 1988 track as Reese, “Just Want Another Chance”.

The vocal topline. The topline is the melody and words on top of the track. Write short phrases on the 8-bar grid and leave rests, so the kick and bass have room.

Before: “I want to stay with you tonight because I feel so alive when we’re together” (too many words for one breath). After: “Stay till the lights come up” (6 syllables, sung twice in 8 bars, with the long note on “stay”). Chop that “stay” into a sample, play it across the chords and you have a lead for the drop. The habits of a chorus people remember work for a topline too.

How to make electronic music in a DAW, step by step

Any DAW will do; learn one well, then:

1. Set the tempo first, from the ranges above.
2. Make an 8-bar loop: kick, clap, hats, bass, one chord sound and one hook idea.
3. Turn that loop into the drop before you write anything else.
4. Copy it across 3 to 4 minutes, then arrange by muting parts for the intro, builds and breakdown.
5. Automate the filters, the risers and a reverb throw on the last beat before the drop.
6. Mix at a moderate volume, compare with a track you love at the same loudness and leave headroom for mastering.
7. Export a WAV and check it on a phone speaker, in a car and on headphones.

When a track feels finished, drop the whole song into Hook Lab: it marks the strongest parts, you pick one (as short as 8 seconds or the full 30), and only that part is uploaded while the full track stays on your device. In blind battles it meets another electronic hook with the names hidden, and wins count toward the charts. In the Dance world, people dance to the song of the day, one of the hottest hooks. The electronic hooks on Vibnelo are listed below, and if there are none yet, yours can be the first.