CH2 Guide 02 Independent explainer
Electronic music genres explained
Genre names are shortcuts that describe a rhythm, a tempo and a mood. This guide walks through the main families of electronic music, where they came from and the rough tempos people use to tell them apart.
Why genre maps disagree
Search for an electronic music genre tree and you will find charts with dozens of branches that do not match each other. That is normal. Genres are made by scenes, labels and listeners, and they split and merge all the time, so no map is official. The useful question is which features a name points to: the tempo, the drum pattern, the sounds, or the club where it was played.
The list below covers five families that most maps agree on. Treat the tempo figures as typical ranges, because plenty of tracks sit outside them.
House
House grew out of dance clubs in Chicago in the early 1980s. It is built on a steady four-on-the-floor kick drum, one beat after another, with a bass line, chords and often vocals on top. The tempo usually falls between about 118 and 130 beats per minute (BPM), which is why a DJ can mix house records smoothly. Deep house, tech house and many other names are variations on that frame.
Techno
Techno took shape in Detroit in the mid to late 1980s. It also uses a steady kick, but it is more mechanical, more repetitive and often darker than house, with synthesised and drum machine sounds at the centre. Typical tempos run from about 120 to 150 BPM, and harder styles go higher. Many techno tracks change slowly, so the interest comes from small shifts in texture over time.
Ambient and downtempo
Ambient music puts atmosphere ahead of rhythm. The term was popularised by Brian Eno, whose album Ambient 1: Music for Airports came out in 1978, and the idea was music that can be listened to closely or left in the background. Ambient often has no beat at all, so a BPM figure means little. Downtempo is the related family where a slow beat returns, usually well below the tempo of house.
Breakbeat, jungle and drum and bass
Breakbeat music is built on drum patterns that are not a straight four-on-the-floor, often sampled from older records and chopped into new rhythms. In the United Kingdom in the early 1990s this led to jungle and then drum and bass, which has fast, syncopated drums over a bass line that is often slower and heavier. Drum and bass usually sits around 160 to 180 BPM.
Dubstep came out of London later and is typically about 140 BPM, but it is felt in half time, so the snare lands on the third beat of the bar instead of on the second and fourth.
Tempo ranges as a rough guide
Tempo is the quickest way to place a track, and it is why searches such as electronic music genres by BPM are common. Rough orders of magnitude: ambient has no fixed pulse, downtempo is slow, house is in the low 120s, techno ranges from the 120s upward, and drum and bass is far faster. DJs use these ranges to plan sets, and producers use them to choose a project tempo before writing a note.
If you want to hear the differences yourself, our guide to making electronic music at home shows how to set a tempo and build a basic pattern, and the page on the Austin scene shows how local nights can mix several of these styles in one place.