In my finger drumming journey, I’ve noticed a few different approaches… let me explain. The first finger drumming performances I ever were aware of were hip hop and electronic artists. They tend to trigger a wide range of sounds, a mix of melodic and rhythmic sounds, to create full songs live. Examples would be Mad Zach, Buck Rodgers, AraabMuzik, Jeremy Ellis, Edison, etc. I don’t actually know a ton of these people and wish I knew more of them since is mainly the style I’m interested in doing myself. A typical feature of this style of playing is that each hand is primarily responsible for a different set of sounds, rather than both hands playing all sounds, and when you need to do rolls, both hands will trigger the same pad. Another feature of this style of playing is that there are no duplicate sounds mapped to the pads. I suppose this is probably because a wider range of sounds need to be accessed, since all parts of the song need to be available.
Then there’s the acoustic style of finger drumming - the style QFG focuses on. This seems to be primarily focused on emulating playing drums, and doesn’t really focus on creating an entire performance of a song, just playing the drums. Hopefully you guys get what the differences are here.
At first, I thought it would make sense if I just took the QFG style of playing, pad layout, etc and tried to apply it to the Hip Hop style of performance, but it didn’t really work out very well. Eventually I settled in copying the pad layout of one of the hip hop style artists I mentioned, and that worked much better for playing back full songs.
So I was just wondering of anyone can kind of relate to what I’m talking about? Is anyone performing full tracks using the QFG method where you’re triggering a large number of sounds and not just the drums? Any tips? Any advice for how to lay out all the different sounds on the pads?
I was talking to this guy recently who’s developing software for Ableton Live that allows for triggering of loops and sounds and sequences and stuff like that. He seems to operate in this space in between drumming and triggering sounds. Check out this video for example. Might not be 100% your genre of music, but I do think its very interesting.
His program is called “nularseq”. I think when this gets developed some more and it’s easy to use, this will open up a huge amount of possibilities.
I actually was inspired by watching Nular’s videos over the summer to get (more) into finger drumming. You’re right, its definitely interesting. I am using a modified version of his NularSeq to do some interesting things already. I guess my issue with his approach is that if you start improvising and adding extra hits (or fewer hits) then you get out of sequence with the notes that you’re playing, so the melody can start sounding kind of random, whereas just having dedicated pads for each note feels more controlled to me. But, I haven’t explored it too deeply so it might be something I can overcome.
If you want to really break away from regular drumming, I think the Building fills course and next level beats courses might come closest to helping you out because they teach you to play rudiments. So patterns between your hands that are not just RLRLRLRL but stuff like RLRRLRLL. And that might come in handy with more hiphop style stuff as well. Not that anybody does this at the moment, but I think it could be interesting.
That said, the more traditional hiphop style triggering of samples will probably sound most authentic if you do it the way everybody has been doing it so far.
For me personally, I always multitrack and build songs that way. I’m less of a live performer and more of a studio nerd who likes to build things as if I’m playing with lego’s.
The rudiments thing is pretty interesting, I came to that conclusion the other day that I was basically playing rudiments when I was attempting to re-create some of the interesting things I was seeing. I actually ripped the audio of this routine and remade it in midi so I could kind of visually see what was going on. Run It Up (Maschine Routine) #BPMSUPREME #whatthebuck - YouTube
If anyone cares, I could probably share this project file (for science!).
So, if you notice, during the drop of the song, the left hand and the right hand often aren’t both hitting at the same time. A pattern would be like LRLRLRRLRLRRLRRR with the L’s alternating between kick and snare (and crash and bass with extra fingers), and the R’s alternating between hats (and playing the lead with extra fingers). So you can kind of break a lot of these patterns into rudiments. Takes me back to my drumline days in marching band.
