Graduate School for Drum Programming

The Grateful Dead band is playing next weekend, and I’m going deep on a few tracks that are new so I can learn them and not use crib notes. In addition to that, I’m going to try to leave my concentration face at home because I look like I’m about to punch somebody in the face when I’m up there playing sometimes. That being said, I’ve stemmed out a bunch of stuff with Ableton and am looking to do a practice track. And I’m using the MPC for it. I realize that I have kind of four sampling universes. And what I mean by that is using a sampler as a drum machine: Teenage Engineering KO series, Ableton, MPC, and the Roland SP-404. The temptation is to think that everything can do everything, but it can’t. The easiest and quickest way to get anything done, at least for me, is the MPC. I saw a great video of John Taylor playing thru Planet Earth, and I’ll link it here. He had what looked like an MPC 60, and that’s what he used to practice bass parts. Sounded amazing. The subtlety of Grateful…