Hi,
I’m trying to up my drum game on my devices (octatrack, A4 and modular) and lately I’ve been falling madly in love with DOMI & JD Beck. I love the playfulness coupled with the incredible complexity.
How would you program this type of beat on an Elektron device?
Lots of trig probability? Pattern chaining?
Would love to hear some insight!
Here’s a video for reference…
Both of those two cats are impressive. I’ve been following them both for a couple of years now.
I’m not sure how you would achieve JD Beck style beats on the OT without some tedious programming. My guess would be programming something pretty complex with micro timing, resampling it, then juggling the slices to get some interesting phrasing. He does a lot of tempo, meter, and swing changes.
for the drums it would be just too boring and tedious to program it.
i’d try to record different patterns takes unquantized at a very slow tempo using metronome.
increase the tempo of the sequencer afterwards, adjust quantize strength or shuffle to moove the groove a bit.
then swich between different pre-recorded patterns.
for the keys it will be difficult to get a groove for chords as the elektron sequencer is mono-ish
That sounds like a good tactic. I think the part I’m struggling with when it comes to drums is the use of ghost notes I never seem to get the feel I want.
The chords are not what I’m aiming to recreate as I am way out of my depth there.
you could record with full velocity and use predefined accents. can get you a long way! 
Id say play drums for a bunch of years and sample that. Its super difficult to get something similar any other way. Unless you could just sample them.
The only way to mimic something like this is by spending the time to program it in - trig probability can be cool for keeping a repetitive beat from getting too monotonous but it’s not a replacement for laborious sequencing (or for a virtuoso drummer!).
I was really into their stuff earlier this year and tried programming a similar beat but wasn’t super happy with it so moved onto something else, clip below:
Piano roll starting from around 12secs into that clip.
(edit: most of these hits are doubled on 2 sounds so programming it is half as intimidating as this pic looks)
To end on a more positive tip: use lots of ghost snares and you can approximate the kind of momentum he has. Don’t repeat the same sample/sound and make the hits shorter than the regular or accented hits. Oh and microtiming is your best friend/worst enemy with this stuff, you can get much more feel and groove by individually pushing hits around but it takes a long time and a lot of trial and error.
you can always use the same sample for each drum part but with a little velocity to volume/tuning/decay/LPF it can work nicely IMHO 
Thanks for sharing! Really cool pattern…
And you’re probably right this might be one of those things where you can’t fake it.
I like your programming. I’m going to study the pic.
Yes and you can also reuse that same sample with little microtiming variations in the sample itself. Whatever works in the case for fancy drum breaks!
JD Beck drumming is planet X level.
Very good points.
Another thing to remember if you’re trying to recreate a drummer’s sound is that they only have 2 hands and 2 feet so if you keep that in mind while programming you won’t end up with completely unplayable/non-realistic stuff.
what an unexpected thread!
as others have said domi would probably be easier to mimic but part of the challenge is that they both been influenced by electronics and computer production
so an indirect starting point would be studying electronic stuff they’re into (and work of their collaborators)
might be a more attainable goal
if you try anyway and “fail” you’ll still probably have some unique patterns to showcase so…i say go for it