Custom Drum Programming

In a recent interview in Modern Drummer, Lenny Kravitz explains why he first left home. It came down to a concert by the late, great Buddy Rich. Rich is considered by most drummers “in the know” to be one of the greatest players who ever lived. Kravitz, aged fifteen, wanted to attend one of Buddy’s concerts with a friend. His father objected to this, complaining that he’d been out the previous night, and told him he had to stay home. He went to the concert - and moved out that night.

The moral of the story? Drums are pretty important to some people.

The problem is that, unlike Lenny, few non-drummers actually have this level of commitment or interest in the instrument. Would you have left home because of a drum performance? Probably not, unless it was your neighbours. Let’s face it; you probably wouldn’t even stoop as low as reading Modern Drummer. But there’s a good chance in this day and age that, if you write music, you’ll have to program drums at some point. Be it for demonstration purposes, to help communicate an idea to a drummer or for actual final production work, the quality of your programming will make a difference to what you land up with in your hand at the end of the day.

As you’ve possibly discovered if you’ve attempted it recently, realistic-sounding drum programming isn’t as simple as it looks. As the tools get better, they need more of a drummer’s mentality to get them to sound as good as the demo MP3s.

The good news is, some people do care about the drums enough to do all the dirty work - like spending thousands of dollars on lessons, and similar numbers of hours practicing. And I’m one of them. If you’re finding drum programming frustrating, time consuming and basically too much for you to handle, I’d love to help.

Finn Higgins
setcreative.com