Technology that defined the second wave of tech house
Pioneer CDJs and DJMs
1We wouldn’t normally consider DJ gear to be much of an influence on the music itself, but the rise of tech house coincided with the emergence of digital DJing technology and there are interesting parallels to be drawn with the way Pioneer CDJs and DJM mixers encourage DJs to select particular types of track and mix them in a certain way, notably favouring quite rigidly-structured arrangements suitable for looping, applying effects and carrying out long, perfectly-synced blends. There’s an argument that digital DJing has had as much to do with the evolution of tech house as music software itself.
Sample packs 2
It’s certainly not just tech house that’s benefited from the surfeit of royalty-free loops and samples, but the rise of the sample market has helped the genre achieve such dominance. Sample CDs have been around since the early ’90s, but the market reached critical mass in the early 2000s, when dozens of new companies popped up offering sample DVDs (and eventually downloads) based on increasingly specific genres and styles. By the 2010s, the market was flooded with sample packs at ever-cheaper prices, meaning that it was easier than ever to create authentic versions of club styles. If there’s any substance to the criticisms of tech house for being formulaic, they surely stem from the widespread availability of generic sounds and loops. But tech house certainly isn’t the only genre where that’s true, making it something of an unfair criticism.
Ableton Live 3
You can draw a line somewhere in the early 2000s where the original tech house sound pioneered by the likes of Mr C, Terry Francis and Eddie Richards evolved into the slightly more commercial sound we know today. You can identify a lot of reasons why genres evolve, but in this case there’s a strong correlation with the evolution of music tech. Ableton Live was first released in 2001, and the software quickly became popular with house producers. Growing in parallel with the early 2000s tech house scene, there’s no doubt Live has had a big influence on the genre (and others), fostering a loopbased approach to composition that already existed in other DAWs but works particularly efficiently in Live.