Loft House

Loft House is for the long middle of a set, when nobody is waiting for a drop and the room has settled into the groove. Warm, swung, built on chords rather than on a hook. The kind of record that can play at midnight or at five in the morning and mean something different each time. If you build around Kerri Chandler and Larry Heard, follow the deeper end through Ron Trent and Glenn Underground, or lean on the garage side of MAW and Todd Terry, this pack was voiced for that floor. Everything in it sits in DORIAN. It is one note away from natural minor - the sixth is major - and that note is the whole genre: it turns the fourth degree into a dominant chord sitting over a minor tonic. Take it away and a house vamp becomes an ordinary minor loop. Twenty chord progressions run from two-chord vamps to eight-chord walks, with ninths and elevenths that move, a flat sixth borrowed from natural minor, a secondary dominant and a half-diminished sixth degree. The Rhodes carries the harmony, and it does three jobs. Stabs land on the offbeats, where house has put them for forty years. Broken chords fill the sixteenths the stabs leave open, one voice at a time. Riffs sit on top - short, two to eight notes over two bars, with the space that makes a top line stick. That is 168 files across loops and one shots, and each chord is voiced five different ways: close, drop-2, quartal, wide, and rootless. Quartal is the deep house voicing - fourths stacked instead of thirds - and without a third in the way the chord stops declaring major or minor and just gives colour. The bass is FM. Not a filter closing over a sawtooth: a sine modulating another sine, where the harmonics are born instead of being taken away. Twelve characters across three registers, with the modulation index opening slowly across each loop, which is the movement house has always had. The drums come from the 909 side of the family. Five groove recipes written for this genre - the open hat on every offbeat eighth, the closed hat leaving those positions free the way one channel on a real machine does, the double clap, the Chicago shuffle. Four kits, from a bare machine to the same machine put through tape. Every sixteenth is swung and every hit is accented: a loop that is not swung sounds programmed no matter what you put on top of it. What makes all of it different is how it was made. Every sound is synthesised from scratch by our own DSP code, not sampled. No re-licensed libraries, nothing to clear. That makes the pack original, and it means whatever you build with it is yours. It also means every decision was deliberate, and measurable. The percussion loops leave the kick alone: on the downbeats they sit 56 dB below their own peak under 120 Hz, so they lock in instead of smearing it. Melodic content comes in all ten dorian keys, so a Rhodes stab and a bass line from the same pack agree. Nothing clips: the highest true peak in 627 files is -0.50 dBFS. Levels are balanced the way a record is balanced, not normalised flat. Load any four files at unity and they already sound like a mix. What's inside: 426 loops and 201 one shots. Loops are 54 Full Drum, 48 Stripped Drum, 48 Rhodes Stab, 48 Rhodes Chord, 48 Bass, 42 Top, 36 Percussion, 36 Rhodes Lead, 24 Synth Pad, 24 Synth Strings, 9 Risers, 9 Downers. One shots are 36 Rhodes, 36 Bass, 24 Kicks, 24 Hi Hats, 12 Claps, 12 Snares, 12 Shakers, 9 Rides, 9 Congas, 9 Bongos, 6 Rimshots, 6 Toms, 6 Woodblocks. Every category has its own folder. 627 files, 124 BPM, keys A, A#, B, C, D, E, F, F#, G, G# dorian. WAV 24-bit / 44.1 kHz stereo. ACID tempo and key metadata on all 627 files, sampler loop points on all 426 loops. Loops are 4 bars (pads and strings 8, SFX 2), zero-crossing trimmed. 100% royalty-free - no third-party samples, nothing to clear.