When you first buy a drum machine, all the buttons and knobs can look very overwhelming. Thankfully, every drum machine has preset patterns that you can play around with to get started.
However, the true value of a drum machine comes from the potential to make different types of drum patterns to perfectly fit whatever music you’re using it for.
Whether you’re using your drum machine for fun at home or providing drum parts at live gigs, you should know how to program different drum patterns yourself.
Here’s a quick guide on a few things you need to know that will help you along the way.
Your kick drum and snare drum are your two most important sounds for most drum patterns that you create. They’re going to establish the overall feel of the groove, and the snare shots will establish the backbeat.
The backbeat is the glue that holds everything together, so placing it first is usually a good idea. Typically, a backbeat will fall on beats two and four.
Once you have that, you can place different bass drum rhythms around it to create a solid beat.
When you hear this beat repeating, you can decide if it’s what you want or not. If you don’t like it, try changing where the kick drum sounds are placed. If it’s still not what you want, try to change where the snare drums land.
Just note that changing the snare drum hits is how you change the vibe of the pattern completely.
Once you have your snare drum and bass drum sounds going, you can place hi-hat sounds for a bit of texture.
You have a choice here to place constant 8th notes or 16th notes. You could also place syncopated hi-hats, meaning they fall in random places to make a more complex-sounding drum beat.
You just have to experiment with hi-hat placements, as these can fall anywhere, and the groove will arguably still sound good.
It’s a good idea to change the hi-hat rhythms up every few bars, as having the same beat playing over and over can start to sound a bit stale. With the hi-hats not affecting the overall vibe too much, they’re the easiest thing to change.
Now that you have the groove going with the bass drum, snare drum, and hi-hats, you can choose whether to have it swing or not.
Most drum machines will allow you to change this, and it changes how close certain notes are together.
As you create the groove, it will be played as straight as possible. There should be some sort of slider or button that allows you to change the swing level.
Having a drum pattern swing can often make it sound a lot groovier, so you should try it on the beat you created to see what happens.
As we mentioned earlier, having the same groove repeat over and over can become stale quite quickly. So, it’s a good idea to add a bit of variety every few bars.
Some producers have specific guidelines that they like to follow with this, like the two, four, and eight technique.
This refers to when you have a specific drum played every two bars, then a louder drum played every four bars, and then an even louder drum played every eight bars.
You can make it quite subtle, but it will sound a lot better than the exact same drum beat being played every bar.
There are thousands of different ways to do this. The more drum patterns you create, the more your ideas will flow nicely.
The final thing to mention is that you need to make sure your drum patterns are suitable for whatever situation you’re in.
If you’re making a drum pattern for an electronic dance music song, having a simple rock beat will sound very out of place. In the same breath, an upbeat dance groove will sound far too busy for a laidback blues tune.
Make sure you’re serving the music as best you can with the patterns you create.
This also relates to the type of drum machine you have. Some of them only allow you to create electronic drum kit beats, while others only offer acoustic drum kit sounds.
There are dozens of simple drum machines out there. However, we know a lot of people that would say the Korg Volca Beats is one of the easiest ones to use.
It’s a very small drum machine that caters well to first-time users. The interface is very intuitive, and it makes programming drum beats quite simple.
Programming simple drum beats isn’t hard at all. You just need to press a few buttons to get a groove that loops, and it will sound fantastic with all the high-quality sounds that drum machines offer.
However, programming different beats that are nuanced enough to sound interesting for entire songs is hard. This is something that music producers take years to master.
There are several ways to program unique drum patterns. One of the easiest ways is to move your snare drum from landing on beats two and far. By changing the backbeat, you’ll get drum grooves that sound different from what everyone is used to.
While programming drum machine patterns can be tricky at first, it gets easier the more time you spend with your machine. It works the same with virtual machines that you can use with DAWs.
You just have to practice in the same way you do with instruments. The more patterns you create, the better you’ll get at making unique ones that serve songs well.
Just make sure that you’re making the best types of drum patterns for whatever music you’re creating. There’s nothing worse than a drum pattern that sounds out of place.
Drum Teacher
Brett Clur has a Drum Performance Diploma from Trinity College London has been playing drums for over 20 years. He is passionate about advanced concepts and uses his years of experience to teach his students about them. While he is a full-time drum teacher, he is also working on growing a YouTube channel where shares his insights. You can see him playing there, or on Instagram where he posts daily videos.
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