The ultimate finger-drumming rig? :)

Finger Drumming Gear / Software / Setup
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I’ve built a new finger-drumming rig using the Novation Launchpad X, Ableton Live, and Addictive Drums 2, and I’m pretty delighted with how it’s turned out.

The goal was to make something intuitive, expressive, and easy to play—not just a collection of 64 drum pads.

Here’s what it offers:

  • Intuitive layout. Inspired by the Yamaha FGDP and Quest for Groove layouts. There’s a lot of redundancy, so don’t be intimidated by the 64 pads! Most of that space is used for ergonomics and expressive control.

  • Three dynamic levels: soft, normal, and loud. Most kit pieces have adjacent pads for soft and normal hits. Strike two pads for the same instrument simultaneously, and the software combines them into a single, powerful accent. Even the bass drum, which I usually play with my thumbs, has this dynamic control.

  • Fast triplets and rolls. The ring-to-middle finger motion is remarkably quick, and using ring → middle → index across both hands makes six-note snare rolls feel surprisingly natural.

  • Easy fills. The snare and toms are arranged in columns, making it straightforward to move around the kit.

  • Optional dynamics. A single button switches the quiet pads to normal sensitivity for when you just want to go wild.

  • One-button cymbal choking. A single, out-of-the-way pad chokes every cymbal and ride at once.

The image shows how the 8×8 pad layout is organized. It’s roughly symmetrical, so both hands have access to the same drums. Most kit pieces have two adjacent pads, one for soft hits and one for normal hits. Since I’m right-hand dominant, the right side favors normal hits and the left side favors softer ones, although both dynamics are available to either hand. The clever part is that striking any two pads assigned to the same drum simultaneously produces a single, powerful accent. This is remarkably easy with adjacent pads, since two fingers can strike together almost as if they were one. So despite having 64 pads, the layout is quite simple: lots of intentional redundancy to make different dynamics and fast playing feel natural.

Novation Launchpad X.001
Novation Launchpad X.0011022×1051 387 KB

The result is an instrument that feels surprisingly natural to play, with plenty of room for subtlety and expression.

I’ve also made a video walking through the whole setup.

If anyone wants the Novation Launchpad X configuration or the Ableton/Max for Live setup, I’m happy to share!

Cheers,
David

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Loved the video explainer. Would I be able to use this with Logic Pro? I don’t do anything live but I would love to add drum tracks instead of relying on Band in a Box drummers.

Thanks

H

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Thanks! I wrote everything for Ableton. I’m not sure where you are in your finger drumming journey given your comment about Band in a Box for drums. The QFG lays out how to get started on all the different pads, etc, and should be totally doable in Logic Pro.

If you want the dynamics-enabled Launchpad X controller I demo in the video, then I think most of it is doable, and some of it is hard.

Easy: copying the layouts on the LX.

Probably easy: differentiating quiet/medium dynamics. This just requires sending different midi channels for soft vs. medium dynamics, and then piping the two channels to two different velocity curves. In Ableton, this is very straight forward, so I assume in Logic Pro, it’d be a piece of cake also.

Hard: Two-finger chords for loud dynamics. There’s a neat and nontrivial piece of logic that I wrote with ChatGPT to handle the chording. It’s written in Max for (Ableton) Live language, so isn’t compatible with Logic Pro.

So you can probably get 2/3 of the way there with very little effort. I can send my LX config files, no problem.

-David

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That would be great thanks. harold@smoliardesign.com

Fingerdrumming Shpongle style