Lesson Plan

Code a Chicago House Beat

Learn how to code and customize a Chicago-style House beat.

Level

Beginner

Time

45 minutes

Try It

In this activity we're going to learn how to code a Chicago-style House beat. House music originated in Chicago's underground club culture and has since become a worldwide phenomenon. House is characterized by a thumping four-on-the-floor beat pattern and high energy tempos in the 120 to 130 beats per minute range. Take a minute to listen to this example track, and try to pick out all of the different drum sounds.

Here's what the basic House patteren looks like. Notice that there's a kick drum placed at the start of every beat (four-on-the-floor). There are also snare drums at the start of beats 2 and 4.

Now that we have an idea of what a House beat sounds like, let's code it in Python.

Step 1: Log In to TunePad

Go to tunepad.com
Click on Sign In
Click on Sign in with Google
Enter your Gmail address and password

Step 2: Create a new TunePad Project

Click on the New Project button to create an empty project. It should look like the picture below.

Step 3: Kick Drums

Click on the Add Cell button in your new project.
Click on the Drum button to add a new drum cell.
Change the name of the cell to Kicks.
Set the instrument to Drums → Headlines Drums and add this code.
Press the Play button to hear how it sounds.

/# Kick drum (play note 0 four times in a row) playNote(0) playNote(0) playNote(0) playNote(0)

Note that the first line of code above starts with a hashtag symbol (#). In Python programming, anything that comes after a hashtag is called a comment. Comments are notes for human programmers that are ignored by Python. Line 1 is there to help remind us which lines of code play the kick drum part.

Step 4: Snare Drums

Click on the Add Cell button again to add a second Drum cell.
Call this cell Snares
For the snare drum part, we want to add hits to beats 2 and 4 while skipping beats 1 and 3.
The easiest way to do this is to use the rest function.
Try playing both the Kick and Snare cells together at the same time.

/# Snare drum (note 2) rest(1) # skip beat 1 playNote(2) rest(1) # skip beat 3 playNote(2)

Step 5: Hi-Hats

In House music, hi-hat sounds get sprinkled between the kicks and snares to add energy and originality.
Here's a very simple pattern that you can customize.
In the next activity we'll learn how to use loops in Python to make more interesting hi-hat patterns.

/# Hi-hats (note 5) rest(0.5) # rest for a half a beat playNote(5) # play a hi-hat sound playNote(5) playNote(5) playNote(5, beats = 0.5) # play the last hi-hat for only half a beat

Try playing all three cells together at the same time to hear how they sound.

Step 6: Turbo Kicks

Here's a slightly more complicated version of the kick drum cell that uses a Python loop to repeat each drum sound four times in a row. It also plays a softer echo of each kick, which can add variety and energy to your beat.

for i in range(4): playNote(0, beats = 0.5) # play the kick drum for half a beat playNote(0, beats = 0.5, velocity = 60) # play it again more softly

Tips for Live Coding

Practice makes perfect. Practice typing out lines of code so that you can do it fluidly, confidently, and accurately.
Make use of Copy+Paste for repeated lines of code (you can also use a loop, which we'll show in the next beat activity).
Write some starter code ahead of time. That way you don't have to code everything from scratch.
Add or remove a hashtag at the beginning of lines of code to add or remove elements from live music.