Trance House

Trance House is a popular sub-genre in trance music and contains elements of house, techno, and ambient music. By the late 1990s, trance became more focused on the anthemic qualities and melodies, moving away from arpeggiated analog synth patterns. Acoustic elements and spacey pads became popular with compositions leaned towards incremental changes à la progressive structures. Progressive trance contains distinctive sounds in many tracks, such as unusual basslines or original synthesized sounds, which generally makes it more "catchy". Phrases are usually a power of two number of bars in most typical progressive trance tracks. Phrases usually begin with the introduction of a new or different melody or rhythm.

Compared to trance, the progressive wing is usually deeper and more abstract, featuring a lower average bpm (around 125-135 instead of 130-160) and a recurrent melodic structure. This structure is intuitively described as consisting of three major structural elements: (1) build-up; (2) breakdown ; (3) climax. These three structural elements are expressed either temporally or in their intensity, if not both. A 'build-up' sequence can sometimes last up to 3 or even 4 minutes. Subtle incremental/decremental acoustic variations (i.e., gradual addition/subtraction of instruments) anticipate the transition to each subsequent structural element of the track. The initial build-up and the final break-down are generally very similar, adding a feel of symmetry to the general structure of the melody. Furthermore, a progressive trance track is usually longer than a regular trance track, ranging in length from 5-6 to even 12-13 minutes.

Although there is a general and increasing tendency to associate progressive trance with progressive house (or vice-versa), virtually rendering these two sub-genres identical, there are however distinctive characteristics apart from the strong similitudes between them: progressive trance inherits from its parent genre (trance) a wider melodic flexibility, while progressive house is usually darker and more minimal.

Some of the most representative names that currently work in this sub-genre are Laurent Veronnez, Sasha , Mike Dierickx, Matt Darey, Paul Oakenfold, Paul van Dyk, Vibrasphere, Armin Van Buuren, Tiesto, Brian Transeau (aka BT), and more recently, Markus Schulz.

Progressive House

Progressive house is a style of house music that is noted for musical progression within melodies and basslines. The term was coined by Mixmag editor Dom Phillips. It has similar elements to both electro house and trance. It has its origins in Great Britain in the early 1990s, with the output of Guerilla Records and Leftfield's first singles (particularly "Song of Life"). The music itself was produced with the 4-to-4 beat of house music and deeper dub-influenced basslines, with greater emphasis on emotion before structural considerations. Often, it featured elements from many different genres mixed together. Song of Life, for instance, has a trip-hop like down-pitched breakbeat and a high-energy Roland TB-303 riff at various stages.

In 1992, the dance club Renaissance opened in Mansfield where DJs Sasha and John Digweed were instrumental in popularizing its early sound. Other notable Progressive House DJs include: Deadmau5, Dave Seaman, Nick Warren, Jason Jollins, Hernan Cattaneo and Anthony Pappa.

Garage House

Garage House is a style of music developed in the Paradise Garage nightclub in New York City, USA in the early 1980s.

Funky House

Funky house is a loose definition for a commercially orientated, disco influenced subgenre of house music. Like most varieties of house, the genre follows a traditional four to the floor house beat, and makes heavy use of synthesizers, samples and soulful vocals, though instrumental tracks are also common. Notable producers that have worked in this genre include Fedde le Grand, the Freemasons, Soul Central, Armand van Helden, StoneBridge and Seamus Haji.

The genre is commercially popular, with record labels such as Ministry of Sound, Hed Kandi, and Fierce Angel all releasing compilation albums dedicated to the genre.

Confusingly the terms "house and funky", and "funky" have also been used to describe an offshoot of the UK garage genre heavily based on funk samples and R&B style vocals over a "broken" soca style beat.

Electro House

Electro house is a subgenre of house music that rose to become one of the most prominent genres of electronic dance music today. Stylistically, it combines the four to the floor beats commonly found in house music with harmonically rich analogue basslines, abrasive high-pitched leads and the occasional piano or string riff. The tempo of electro house ranges approximately from 120 to 135 bpm. Electrotech is a darker variation of electro house mixed with the sound of tech house.

The use of the word "electro" to describe this style of modern house music is contentious, and creates an ambiguity between electro house and classic electro, with which it bears little resemblance.

Dream House

Dream house (also known as dream trance), is a dance music style which had a big success on the dance scene between 1995 and 1997. Its main feature is the importance of melody, usually a very dreamy one (hence its name), typically played on a piano, or in some cases a violin, saxophone, etc. And now, as of 2006, for most of the cases, synthesizer sounds. Spanish DJ Dario Nunez used dream house parts in his track "Looking at Me" in 2008.

Deep House

Deep house is a style of house music which fuses elements of Chicago house, disco, 80's soul, jazz-funk and Detroit techno. The Jazz influences of deep house are most frequently brought out by using more complex chords than simple triads (7ths, 9ths, 13ths, suspensions, alterations) which are held for many bars, which give the tracks a slightly dissonant feel. The Disco music sound is a heavy influence in Deep House. The use of vocals is also more common in deep house than in many other forms of house music. Sonic qualities include soulful vocals, slow and concentrated dissonant melodies, smooth, stylish, and chic demeanor.