Percussionists use many more techniques than ‘just hitting’ a drum with a single beater or stick when they play. Double-hits, known as Flams, as well as Ruffs (short splurges of notes) and Rolls are among the other techniques at their disposal.

Just like using Articulation switching in any other group of instruments, varying percussive playing techniques can bring your tracks to life, offering variation and unpredictability. In this chapter, I’m going to use a curated patch within Concussion to show you how to switch out the individual hits of a pattern to alternate playing techniques, simply by Transposing notes up or down into the mapped key range for each Articulation.

This isn’t the only way to make your performances sound more natural; we’ll also explore an appropriate Tempo for the programmed pattern, as well as looking at Microphone balance. By the end of the chapter, we’ll have varied playing techniques for two sizes of Tom, to create the beginnings of a pattern with a lot of power and momentum. 

• 00:00 Introducing different types of playing techniques
• 02:14 Concussion drum line-up
• 03:47 Drawing in initial pattern and adjusting Velocity
• 06:26 Adjusting microphone balance and Tempo
• 07:41 Varying 1-bar pattern to 2 bars
• 09:23 Introducing Flams and timing nudges
• 13:49 Ruffs
• 16:20 Rolls
• 18:18 Copying Low Toms to higher Toms
• 20:50 Playing Techniques summary

Total Chapter Runtime: 22:00