I’m speechless, enjoy
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And here’s a routine I’m not ashamed to share, I think I definitely got better and the sample flip was kinda good too…
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Hey, it’s me again!
This one still needs some polish but almost there
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I did my first live set!
This video is from the second set though, but the first one was only a few days before.
I stumbled a bit towards the end when I was told I only had time for one more song…
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First live set is quite a big step forward, congrats!
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It felt good to be performing live again after about 15 years.
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Great job man, you’ve come a long way there, cool performance and the crowd seemed to enjoy it as well! 
Are you playing to a click? One of the hardest things when drumming/playing rhythm is to stay in the pocket and not speed up when the energy starts rising. We naturally want to go with the vibe, but the tighter you can stay in time/in the pocket at your intended bpm as the vibe pitches up, the harder and deeper the groove will feel.
Good exercise to practice this is to play something you really like at a slow bpm (50-60bpm) to a click (1/4th) and have the click drop out for a bar or two every 4-8 bars (set to taste). Then just try to be on the 1 exactly when it comes back, that’s all
(Edit: bunch of iphone metronomes can do that, I recommend Pro Metronome by EMULabs I believe)
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Thanks!
I practice to the metronome about 10 minutes most days, but I don’t use it when building these beats or live. Especially live I couldn’t, as the tempo varies from song to song and it’s all on the same sequence. Said that, when I listened back to this the first time, I could tell straight away I was rushing it.
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I really enjoyed your performance and the switch from straight groove to triplets I dug in particular. I don‘t think you‘re rushing it exactly, to me it sounds more like you‘re getting lifted/carried away by the momentum. It‘s a subtle difference but important in my book. One is due to impatience, the other is due to the vibe in the room
I understand not playing with a click, totally relate. I play percussive instruments (Berimbau, Pandeiro, Conga) in live settings in the context of Capoeira and having others to orientate your playing by helps lock in the groove…when you play it all by yourself it is MUCH more challenging in my book.
It’s really only about keeping that composure, breathing through the adrenaline rush and being fully committed to the groove rather than what the groove is doing…sounds counter-intuitive maybe, but the rewards are that tight feeling when you feel you’re on rails, going 200mph and everything is still moving in slow motion with every hit landing juuuust right lol
I say it again though, I dug your performance, very impressive that you do that live also. 🫡
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Love this!!! Amazing that you took this to the stage. Sounds awesome!
I’ve spent a week away recently with my new SP404 mk2 and it’s got me really starting to think about finger drumming ‘performances’ more than just sequencing beats as I had done before.
I’ve always been striving to make it as ‘live as possible’ (building beats from scratch etc) as my background is in live bands. Finger drumming seems like a perfect way to go for that.
I’ll read through the above thread but just to help kick me off; how do people go about building their kits, assuming this is a very personal thing - but is there any good ‘packs’ out there to get me going?
Also do people tend to rely on one shots or loops, and gated or non gated samples (esp for melodic stuff?)
I currently have the SP404 mk 2 and the Force - so I’ll be using those. Anyone spent much time finger drumming on the Force? Obv the pads are not MPC/Maschine big, but I assume should be fine
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It’s indeed personal there are a few “standards” but it also depends on the technique you want to use/build.
Technique 1: If you want to control kick, snare, hihat with your right hand only (eg index finger/middle finger/ring finger), then you could use the classic MPC layout with Kick on what would be pad 13 on the SP404, Snare on pad 14, closed hihat on 15, open hihat on 16 - with pad 15 and 16 in a mute group together (so that when you hit pad 16, open hihat, and then hit pad 15, closed hihat, it cuts off the open hhat). You could then have an alternate kick on pad 9, rim shot or alternate snare on pad 10, ride on pad 11, and a crash on pad 12 (or have toms on 10-12).
The rows above that you can use for bass (one shots or loops, depending on how you want to play it) and for harmonic/melodic chops / loops (again depending on how you’d like to play it. In this scenario, your right hand would control the drums and the left hand would control the harmonic content and bass. Jeremy Ellis, one of the most famous finger drummers, uses this technique (and teaches it in an Ask.Audio course on the Maschine hardware which is actually a finger drumming course). Mad Zach from DJ Tech Tools also uses and teaches this technique and also sells a few starter packs for finger drumming.
Technique 2: Alternatively you could use the right hand for hihats and the left hand for kick/snare, in that case you’d give both hands some space, eg have the kick n snare as above and the hihat on eg pad 1 or pad 4. In this scenario you’d use the fingers of the hand that would naturally be available during the right timing to play your bass & harmonic content (eg if your sample chop should trigger on the upbeat and you play hihat on 1/8ths, you’d use another finger on your right hand to also trigger the harmonic content in parallel with your hihat). Basically you use your fingers like a drummer would use their drum sticks, it emulates that style of playing. David Haynes, one of the world’s most accomplished finger drummers and a great jazz drummer, uses this technique (and teaches it in one-to-one lessons via Zoom etc).
Technique 3: Yet another approach would be conceptually dividing your pads section in half (ie a symmetrical left side and right side) and mirroring your sounds on the pads left and right. For example: Kick on pad 13 and pad 16, snare on pad 14 and 15, open hihat on pad 9 and 12, closed hihat on pad 10 and 11 etc. with this layout, you half the sounds available to you BUT you can now play almost anything in any time fairly easily by alternating your hands and eg always playing the downbeats on the right hand and the upbeats on the left hand (assuming you’re grooving primarily in a 1/8th divison). Or you could alternate in 16ths which would mean, starting with your right hand, you’d have the downbeats and the “and”s on your right hand, and the “e” & “a” on your left hand (1 e and a / 2 e and a / and so on ;)). Andreas Samek uses this technique and teaches it in his XPresspads Finger Drumming course.
All three mentioned learning sources are totally worth their money. There’s also Melodics, but personally I find it too gimmick, YMMV though.
I usually play chops, bass and drums as one-shots. But especially on the SP404 I also love looping a nice loop (eg a chord progression or a bass line) and then drumming to that loop and adding accents and tetiary sounds through one-shots.
It really comes down to how you want to do it and what you enjoy doing.
If you want to work on your timing, further up in this thread I’ve shared some of the rudiment exercises David Haynes has showed me when I took classes with him (they are standard exercises for drummers, but David teaches them on drum pads)
Lastly, the SP404mk2 is awesome for finger drumming, one of the best and quite suitable for the first technique I pointed out here, as pads are close by.
Don’t have experience with the Force, but I imagine it would be a dream for technique 3 I mentioned above, because the restrictions on sounds from such a layout would be offset by the many pads you’d have available.
Hope this helps! Good luck and let us know how you progress!
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Thank you for the amazingly in-depth response!!! That is amazingly helpful-I’ll have to spend some time re-reading it in order to really get my head around it all, but that is super helpful, thank you.
I have tended to fall into laying out the pads in the ‘MPC’ style you mention, but in terms of technique am a bit mixed up largely ‘technique 2’ I think, ie using the hands like sticks-left hand in kick and snare and right on hi-hats, sometime splitting the fingers to trigger bass and chord samples.
At the moment all my kits have different sounds set up for melodic samples but all the same note - C. I guess I need to have fewer ‘sounds’ but more notes (or that makes sense) in order to offer more melodic interest if playing on this style.
I’ll check out those learning resources as well and yep, I’ll let you know how I go!!
Cheers
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Thanks!
I tried finger drumming on the Force, the pads feel good but ultimately the Force was too big.
The Sp-404 Mkii pads are nice, but I don’t really like slicing on it. I’m just too used to the Mpc workflow I guess.
As for techniques, I follow a very standard one.
Bottom row, left to right, kick/snare/chh/ other hat.
Second row from the bottom are my main slices, lines above for variations and more samples.
Left hand for kick/snare, right hand everything else, usually the index keeps the 8th or 16th on the chh, switching with the thumb of I need to reach to another pad further away.
But to be honest, apart from the bottom row, the rest varies depending on how I’m sampling and developing the beat.
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Cool, makes sense and feels like a similar approach to the one I have started to follow.
Yep-the Force is interesting, I don’t mind the size in normal use, but playing ‘16 pads’ on it feels silly as it’s cramped in the corner whilst the rest of the unit is massive, so if using the Force I’d be looking at utilising more pads. In one sense that is great as it opens loads of option. However, in practice so far I found it overwhelming.
I am thinking about maybe making a ‘super kit’ with 4 different 16 pad ‘kits’ across the 64 pads. That way I’d concentrate on one group at a time, but the others would be there ‘on hand’ to add variety. I feel that maybe the way forward with the Force (though I had considered trading for a MPC or Maschine +)
Re. Slicing on the SP404-I’m pretty new to it, but so far I’m just doing all of the chopping etc on the Force and sampling into the SP direct from there as it’s easier to work with on the Force.
While I’m at it, let me do some promotion!
Here’s my latest sampling, quite a simple one, but you can see my layout quite easily.
All my routines are also on that YouTube page or on my Instagram.
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Happy the post is helpful to you! On above point: you wanna either create or chop up chord progressions, this will allow you to play with the harmonic structure of a song while finger drumming. So let’s say you’re in the key of C on a major scale, and you’re sampling bob marley’s no woman no cry — that’s song is built on an I - V - VI - IV progression, so Cmaj - Gmaj - Amin - Fmaj. Try to chop it up along the chords, so that your pads will allow you to mix n match the order of these chords.
Another approach would be to chop up elements of a melody, eg little phrases that sound good, then rearrange those to your liking when finger drumming. Of course the same idea also applies to whole sections of songs.
If you collate sample chops from different material into a single drum program (Bank on the SP404), just make sure that all the chops are in the same key — you do that by either making sure the material you sampled from was in the same key or by pitching individual samples up/down until they “match” with your other samples (ie they sound good together NOT they all are in C :))
These are certainly not the only ways to approach it and no hard rules, only good starting points to get used to the idea and the practice of playing samples/sample chops live.
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Sick little flam on that hihat
That was made to show off. I was planning on just resampling it, it was easier but not as cool…
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