Finger drumming from first principles

I used to have a site called PadScience. It was dedicated to pad controllers like the venerable M-Audio Trigger Finger. I still have the Trigger Finger Pro which I consider still one of the best pad controllers ever made. It has polyphonic aftertouch and great sensitivity curves.

So as you know I am a drummer. A classic vibrating head and sticks drummer banging on things. A drummer has two hands and two feet. We have the possibility to make 4 sounds at once. This is a first principle.

We can also do double hits using the sticks. There are two types of double hit. Push-pull and roll. Now we have two more first principles. You can see where I’m going with this.

Rudiments are the combination of these basic principles into little bits of muscle memory. Drumming has two kinds of muscle memory. Timing and independence.

Timing is just the interval between consecutive hits of the drums. Independence is keeping different hands/feet coordinated in time and space.

Ok so now we have some basic things to build on. The kit is positioned in space. Different drummers may put the hi hat higher or lower. Or the snare higher or lower depending on how he likes to hit rim shots. Also, rim shots. That’s another first principle that I just thought of. I’m not sure how that’s going to relate to pad drumming yet.

So with finger drumming. We have ten fingers arranged between two hands. That kind of changes the game a little bit. We can still use our feet if we want to using pedals. I’m going to ignore that for now though.

Ok two hands, ten fingers. Let’s ignore the fingers for now. Although I think fingers are important for normal drumming but more in aggregate for rebound and push-pull techniques. In that case all of the fingers work in concert instead of individually like they do for the finger drumming techniques.

Ok back to finger drumming. How does it relate to normal drumming? Should it relate to normal drumming? After all there are all sorts of things that aren’t possible in a trap kit that we can do on a pad controller.

Let’s break things down. We generally hit the snare drum with the left hand if we are doing crossover style drumming. However, there are specific rudiments that focus on independence where we play the same beat with different hands and alternate. This builds freedom over the kit. I’d say this is a more advanced move but I think it’s worth introducing early in our practice to stay out of that beginner’s fear mindset where we stay and think small over the kit. That’s one of the things that makes you come across as a beginner. Experts can play a very simple beginner beat and you still know they are an expert.

Rambling along. With a pad controller we can set up the drum sounds any way we want to. Actually in a trap kit we can kind of do the same thing but there are certain patterns that are followed generally. Why is this? The trap kit kind of evolved over time. I suspect that the pad controller will do the same. We already kind of standardized on a 4×4 pad layout thanks to the Akai MPC. Let’s stick with that.

I usually see the kick mapped to the lower left pad. I’m not sure why but it seems to be that most drum instruments map things this way. So that means we are hitting the kick drum with the left hand. Now which finger? We default to the index finger. Maybe we use two fingers for extra force. That brings up some other issues. Sensitivity. How sensitive should the pads be? Real drummers have varying strengths. Some are heavy hitters with heavy sticks. Some are light.

I’m a lighter player. I like to let the character of the drum come through. Dynamics. Oh man there are so many levels to this! What are dynamics in pad playing? Some players on a real kit just blast the drum each time. That’s ok as long as the different drums are relatively in balance. Hitting a hi-hat with that intensity can overwhelm a drum kit mix. Good players know how to balance this out even if they are smashing the kit with a lot of force.

So what does that mean for our pad playing? I think it comes down to getting comfortable. We can adjust everything infinitely. So we can change the velocity curve on the controller. We can change the volume of each individual pad. There are filter settings. So many options!

I think in order to make sense of the chaos we need to consider playability. This is my number one thing for real drums. Each kit I put together should be a joy to sit down at and play. It should respond to my nuances and reward me for my finesse. I’m looking to achieve the same thing from my MPC pads!

Drum patterns come down to kick and snare usually. It’s not that typical to hit the kick and snare at the same time. But, in electronic music it’s very common to hit the kick on every beat, which is rare in rock trap kit playing. Ok so we have a kind of dichotomy here already. I think that disco beats bridge the gap. On a trap kit it feels a little weird to play the beats we hear on EDM records every day.

So what does that mean for playing? I like to play kick and snare with the same finger unless the beat specifically calls for it. There we go. Axiom 1.

What about high hats? Different beats call for different things. As I write all of this out patterns should emerge!

Two finger rolls. If the pads are sensitive enough we can use the index and middle finger on one hand to do alternating rolls. This makes sense for fast hihat patterns. There is a BPM limit above which it gets hard to do hihat patterns. This is kind of the same thing on a trap kit when you are doing disco style two hand hihat patterns but then switch to push-pull on the same hand as things get faster. Trying to get downbeats on the same hand gets hard as the tempo goes up.

We have some other things on pad controllers that are like variations of a drum hit. On a real kit we probably don’t have two kick drums. If we do we have a double pedal to manage that. On a pad controller we might have a whole row of kicks and another row of snares.

Are there setups that we need to categorize here? What makes sense. We aren’t shackled to the practicality of having only a single trap kit set up on stage. We have a whole universe of kits at our disposal. The sky is the limit, but our brains can only take so much. We must reach a middle ground. A reasonable compromise.

Maybe we should think about these things like guitar chords instead? Oh my aching head. Let’s think about arpeggio patterns and arpeggiated chords. Is this a better analogy than the trap kit?

Some patterns lend themselves to arpeggiation. Each hit gets triggered in sequence. We can just memorize the muscle memory in our fingers to pull these off. However it means that we are flying blind. Just keep up the pattern to keep the beat going and if we mess up we are lost.

Some other considerations: One handed vs two handed patterns. Are we playing chords at the same time with the other hand? This is not a consideration for trap kit drummers.

So many questions. I will dive into these in another post.