Electronic Dance Music (EDM) has been developing, morphing, and fuelling dancers for almost 50 years and continues to be one of the most popular genres out there. In simple terms, EDM is a wide variety of beat-driven electronic music made mainly for clubs, raves, festivals, and dance floors.

Embrace and explore with EDM expansions

The start of EDM was arguably back in the 1970s, when Disco ruled dance floors with an innovative use of drum machines and synthesized electronic instruments. However, the 1980s is where EDM really took off, with the post-disco era producing synth pop, house, and other electro music across Europe and North America.

By the 1990s there were tracks being produced that we would recognize as contemporary EDM, with techno, modern house, trance, and drum and bass pushing into the mainstream. Even within these genres, there were variants and differences, with the EDM scenes of Europe and North America growing in step but exploring different sonic territory.

While Europe had embraced EDM for a while – or at least the dancers had – it wasn’t until the 2000s that it really took off in America. Over the past two decades, EDM has grown to be one of the biggest musical genres around the world, with an ever-increasing number of adherents and subgenres. These days, it continues to evolve and change, with innovative producers and performers pushing the boundaries of what EDM can be.

Born from the industrial sounds of Detroit in the mid-80s, techno quickly found its way to the dance floors of West Germany – and with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, young people turned abandoned buildings into temporary clubs and celebrated newfound freedom through hard, electronic beats. Since that time, the jarring edges of early Berlin techno have been smoothed out to deliver a fuller, more atmospheric sound in a city that has by all accounts become the beating heart of global techno. Now you can capture that sound with the Deep Matter EDM expansion pack, which includes extensive Maschine and Battery kits and EDM presets.

Get more minimalist with Pulswerk, which offers a wide range of EDM presets for clean, simple synth work, as well as Maschine and Battery kits to carve out the beats that drive this refined genre of EDM. Created by sound designer Denis Gökdag with a range of vintage and modern hardware synths, soft synths, drum machines, and more run through cutting-edge outboard gear, this EDM expansion offers the most refined EDM sounds on dance floors today.

As EDM has moved into the mainstream, it’s blended, merged, and mixed with other genres to create new and interesting sounds that can be tapped into any track for a unique, engaging sound. Native Instruments EDM expansions like Stadium Flex and Meteoric Rise for example, bring together bright pop EDM production with the rolling beats of modern trap music and R&B melodies.

Other expansions are more focused on specific genres, such as trance expansion Lucid Mission, which offers synths, build-ups, and beats for this unique style of EDM.

All-in-one EDM expansions

Explore the sounds of club-ready EDM production with Transistor Punch, which brings together more than 900 samples and pre-built EDM kits. This premium selection of drum hits, synthesizer sounds, multi-effect chains, and patterns delivers everything you need for dance floor-filling EDM.

Utilizing some of the most sought-after gear in EDM – including the Roland TR-909, PEARL Syncussion SY-1, TAMA Techstar analog drum modules, Oberheim Xpander, Alesis Andromeda, and Roland Jupiter 6 – all processed through the best outboard gear possible, Transistor Punch offers genre-defining sounds in a simple-to-use EDM expansion pack.