Book Review - Drum Programming

Last week, I grabbed this book from my shelf, and decided to finally sit down and work my way through it. "Drum Programming: A Complete Guide to Program and Think Like a Drummer" by Ray F. Badness, it's old, but the information is still useful.

A few years ago, my cousin suggested that I should learn how to think like a drummer, in order to be a better music producer. Taking his advice, I had actually gotten myself an electronic drum set just so that I could practice playing the drums and understand what it means to be a drummer. Although this book doesn't teach you how to play on a real live drum set, it does teach you how to program your drumming patterns into your drum machine like how a drummer would.

It's a thin book, and a quick easy read, but what you get most out of it is the practice you'll have from inputting each of the drum patterns into your machine. Regardless of which DAW, drum machine, or software you're using, the patterns can be used universally as long as you're working with a step-sequencer or piano roll. It briefly goes over the main parts of a drum set (the kick, snare, hi-hat, cymbals, and toms) and explains what each is used for. You'll learn a total of 42 patterns from the book, and by the end of it, you'll combine them all into a complete and structured song.

The practice that you get from putting in each note into your machine to create the patterns, and then arranging them into a whole song is where I think you get the most value from this book. It doesn't try to teach you a whole lot of different patterns from various genres (see 260 Drum Machine Patterns for that), but instead focuses on helping you to program your first complete Pop song. Using sort of a paint-by-number approach to drum programming, if you take the time to sit down and work through all 42 patterns, you'll get better at programming drums just from the time you've spent getting all the patterns into your machine.

I think that's what makes this book great, because it's all in the doing. If you want to learn how to program drums, just get this book and start DOING it!