Don’t Over-Program your Drum Patterns

What’s up MM fam, E52BEATS here with a question… How important is drum programming to you? Do you take the time to program each kick, snare and hi hat or does a simple boom bap get the job done for you?

I’ve made a pretty good living off of programming drums for other producers (see the image below of a project I worked on with Large Professor, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Rob Swift and others). What I can tell you from my experiences is it always comes down to the case of less is more. I used to do these real intricate drum patterns until one day I was watching a high dive competition…this one guy did all these real elaborate flips and twist but the end result wasn’t good for him. The next guy that followed did one backflip and hit the water like the drop of a dime thrown off the Brooklyn bridge into the east river and scored all 9’s across the board, and that’s when it hit me… I was doing way too much. A lot of times the kick and snare just need to be positioned in the right place to make the track stand out without sounding over produced.

Nothing sounds worst than an over produced track. I know a lot of y’all are guilty of this and believe me it’s not your fault. As you start to become skilled at your craft production starts to become easy, so easy that you think the track is not done because you made it so fast (at least that was the case with me). I thought I had to spend hours making all these tricky drum patterns, but after that divers competition I started to take on the less is more approach. Once I started to put it into practice I begin to see how the tracks started to sound better because they weren’t cluttered with so many drums anymore. Diamond D used to call my kicks (busy) lol and when I go back and listen to my old beats I can see exactly what he was talking about.

So the next time you sit down to produce a track I want you to take the less is more approach and see where this takes your track. You can even A-B it to see which sounds better. Aiight’ y’all until the next one, this is E52 saying stay tuned and stay BANGIN’. . . Peace

E52BEATS

I’m the boss, I don’t make copies, I make originals.

www.twitter.com/e52beats

www.instagram.com/e52beats

www.soundcloud.com/e52beats