House music has never required a conservatory. Some of the most-played records in the genre are built on two or three chords, played with feel. What separates a demo from a record is not harmonic complexity; it is knowing which few chords belong together and voicing them like a musician instead of a MIDI grid. Both of those are learnable in one sitting. Let's go.
The one rule: stay in the key
A key is just a club with seven member chords. Pick a key, use its seven chords, and everything you play will fit together. That is the entire secret. Wrong-sounding progressions are almost always a chord from outside the club.
You do not need to memorize which seven. For any minor key (most house lives in minor), the pattern off the root is: minor, diminished (skip it for now), major, minor, minor, major, major. In A minor that gives you: Am, C, Dm, Em, F, G. Six usable chords. That is your palette, and it is bigger than most classic house records ever use.
The five progressions that run the genre
Numbers here are positions in the key (Roman numeral style, but read them as pad numbers 1 through 7). In A minor: 1 = Am, 3 = C, 4 = Dm, 5 = Em, 6 = F, 7 = G.
1 - 6 - 3 - 7 (Am, F, C, G). The workhorse. Emotional but driving; half of melodic house sits on this.
1 - 4 (Am, Dm). Two chords, forever. Deep house lives here: the movement comes from rhythm and voicing, not from changing chords.
6 - 7 - 1 (F, G, Am). The lift. Feels like it is always resolving upward into the root; a natural pre-drop and drop progression.
1 - 7 - 6 - 7 (Am, G, F, G). The classic descent and return. Darker, hypnotic, great for tech house where you want motion without sweetness.
4 - 1 - 6 - 5 (Dm, Am, F, Em). Starts off the root, so it feels like a question answered mid-phrase. Good for breakdowns.
Loop any of these for eight bars with a decent sound and you have the harmonic spine of a track.
Voicing: the difference between a doorbell and a record
Here is why your chords sound like a ringtone even when the progression is right. If you play every chord as a root-position triad (root, third, fifth, stacked in order), every change makes the whole hand jump. Real keys players do two things instead:
They keep common notes where they are. Moving Am to F, both chords contain A and C. A player keeps those two fingers down and moves one note. The change sounds smooth because most of the sound did not move.
They spread the notes. Instead of three notes bunched in one octave, put the root low, and the rest wider apart, often with the third on top. Same chord, triple the size.
Practical version for the piano roll: after writing a progression as block triads, drag the middle note of every other chord down an octave, then minimize how far each note travels between chords. Ten minutes of nudging beats any preset expansion pack.
Rhythm turns chords into house
Sustained pads are fine, but house chords are usually rhythmic. Three patterns cover most of the genre: the offbeat stab (chords on the eighth notes between kicks, the oldest trick in house and still undefeated), the push (hitting just before beat 3 to pull the groove forward), and the sustained pad under a rhythmic stab copy of the same chords. Duplicate your progression to two tracks, make one a pad and one a stab, and mute between them for arrangement movement.
Write yours in ten minutes
- Pick a minor key. A minor is fine; every key sounds the same on a grid.
- Choose one of the five progressions, eight bars.
- Voice it: minimize finger travel, spread the notes, keep common tones.
- Add the offbeat stab rhythm.
- Hum over the loop. The notes you hum that fit are in the key; chase one as a topline using only white keys (in A minor, literally the white keys).
The plug, honestly
Everything above is doable in any piano roll, and learning it makes you better. We built Aurichord because we wanted the palette and the voicings to be the starting point instead of the homework: pick a key once, the seven chords of that key land on seven pads voiced like a session player, the melody zone only contains notes that fit, and the ORBIT arpeggiator adds the motion. The five progressions in this post are pad patterns: 1-6-3-7 is literally pads 1, 6, 3, 7. If theory-by-accident sounds like your speed, there is a demo, and it is a one-time license like everything ForgeDSP makes.