Drum Programming Quotes

I grew up on Dilla, Timbaland, Pharrell, all these drums that are super pocketed, so all those influences come out on a song like 'Ungrateful Eyes,' with all the crazy drum swing.

Some records with drum machines on them sound phony and plastic. It all depends on how you use the tools.

I have a method of working on music: I'll get up in the morning and throw down some drums on my drum machine, and then I'll come back later and try to pop off rhythms to it.

I write on the acoustic guitar, I write some on the piano, but I've been messing around with these guitar pedals and drum machines, educating myself in that world.

I don't regard myself as a great classical or jazz pianist. I like country music, but I'm not a great player. I just like music. Drums 'n' bass is pretty exciting and I'd love to explore it.

I was making all my own beats, and I really liked sampling stuff, like old '50s and '60s pop and soul and doo-wop records. I was chopping those up and putting loops and drums on them and just rapping over them.

Dubstep has everything for me. Rhythm, sound design, heartfelt emotion - all in one place.

For "Running Up That Hill" we had worked with a drum machine [in 1985]; the basic rhythms of "Running Up That Hill" happened because the whole track was built on a drum machine.

I got heavily into the drum-and-bass scene, which is really wicked.

I normally start at the computer with something really simple like a four-bar loop of a drum sample or a bass line. And then I just start adding layers of synthesizers.

When I was a kid, I played drums, and when I first got a 4-track, I would put down drumbeats and then do the rest of the tracks on top.

I felt like I plateaued at playing drums, like I wasn't getting any better. I bought an electric pair of drums, sold my drum set, and got introduced to making beats.

I was the first artist, I think, to ever do an all-keyboard album. There were things that resembled it, like Stevie Wonder. A lot of his stuff was on keyboards, but he used brass and he used other things as well. I was the first artist, also, to use drum machines. I was really the one who kind of started that whole thing.

With a computer, you have access to so many drum sounds and samples that your snare drum will be unrelated harmonically to your kick drum.

I write almost every single part of my songs, even the actual drum parts sometimes, whether they be simple or layered with many different instruments.

I found it easy to produce. I'm not the musical guy. I can't read and play music like that, but put some drums and a sample in front of me and I can whip it up nice, and I'll work out some keys and find some interesting instruments to put under it.

I feel like, with drum programming, the way I used to do it, I'd think of how somebody would play these drum patterns and then try to replicate that through programming. It's not that it's better or worse, it's just a different style.

Yeah, my drum programming especially is based on my knowledge of playing a drum kit. For the bass too, definitely. It was the first thing that I translated any sort of ideas through. It must have shaped it somehow.

When I went in there, we used drum machine on "Time After Time" and "Human Nature".We don't use the drum machine to play a pattern. You play the pattern by being consistent.

Blue Monday's distinctive intro was written on an Oberheim DMX drum machine.

People don't realize how much it means to your music to record on tape, whether it be for new music or old music. People don't realize how much or how imperative it is to use actual hardware when making drums because those are actual percussion samplers. They're hardware instruments that are made to have the drum hit.

As a composer I approached the drums differently than a non-composing drummer. I embraced drum machines.