Finger drumming practice, without owning an MPC
Finger drumming is playing a kit with your hands on sixteen pads instead of with sticks, and the hard part is not speed - it is evenness. This page gives you the three things practice needs: pads that respond to how hard you hit them, a click to play against, and a recording that plays back exactly what you did rather than what you meant.
Start with one hand and two sounds
Put the kick under your left index finger and the snare under your right. Turn METRONOME on and play a bar of four with nothing else in it until the click disappears underneath you - when your hit lands exactly on the beat you stop hearing the click as a separate sound. That is the whole skill, and everything below is an elaboration of it.
Then add hats, and learn to play quietly
Hats live on A S D F. Play straight eighths and try to make every second one softer. Most beginners can play fast long before they can play soft, and a hat line at one volume is the clearest sign of a beat that was programmed rather than played. Watch the pad light - its brightness tracks the velocity you actually sent, so you can see the unevenness before you can hear it.
Practise against the pattern, not the click
Draw a kick and snare into the step grid, press PLAY, and drum the hats over the top by hand. Playing against a part that is already perfectly in time is much harder than playing to a click, and it is what recording actually feels like. Switch REC to TAKE and each pass replaces the last, so you can loop the same two bars for twenty minutes without piling them up.
Then turn quantize off
Leave Q on while you are learning where the hits go. Then turn it off. Unquantized playback is a merciless mirror - and this machine subtracts both the audio output latency and your own reaction time from every hit it records, so what you hear back is what your hands did, not what the browser added.
Patterns worth copying
- The Jungle Break: Syncopated Snares at 172172 BPM
- Boom Bap at 90 BPM: the dusty backbeat90 BPM
- Dilla-style drunk swing87 BPM
- Four on the Floor124 BPM
- The hip hop skeleton: kick on 1, snare on 2 and 4, ghosts in the gaps90 BPM
- The Full House Groove: Four on the Floor, Offbeat Hats and a Rolling Shaker124 BPM
- The Dembow Riddim96 BPM
- Trap Hi-Hats: 8ths, 32nd Bursts and a Triplet Turnaround140 BPM
Kits to practise on
- Boom Bap drum machine88-94 BPM
- Trap drum machine130-150 BPM (half-time feel)
- Lo-Fi Hip Hop drum machine70-85 BPM
- House drum machine120-126 BPM
- Techno drum machine130-140 BPM
- Drum and Bass drum machine172-176 BPM
- Afro House drum machine120-124 BPM
- UK Garage drum machine130-135 BPM
- Funk drum machine100-110 BPM
- 808 drum machine100-130 BPM
BAP Studio is inspired by classic 16-pad sampler and drum-machine workflows. It is an independent project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Akai Professional, Roland, or any other manufacturer.
Made by Max Berggren.