200 Drum Machine Patterns Paperback – 1 Sept. 1987

Though these patterns aren't really for modern day music, they are great to start as a template and then modify them to your own specification. Would be good if someone could bring out an up to date book like this, but this is as good as you'll get just now.

Brilliant. Well presented and easy to follow. A great way to learn sight reading if you were inclined to go deeper

I've just built a Korg Volca setup to develop music. One of my unit is the Korg Sample and it's used commonly for drum sequences (amongst other sounds). Since I'm just starting out and knowing little about drums, I usually only stumble upon a half decent, creative beat by fluke. Therefore I thought I'd look into the topic more after seeing some 'drum science' and common beats on YouTube. I wanted more though and something to read, so I opted for this book.It's exactly what I was wanting and 200 patterns is certainly more than enough for me. What's more (and the book condones this in the intro), the patterns are intended for you to get a taste and modify to your own personal and creative needs. There are 4 pages at the back of the book with blank grids (comprising Measure A, B and Break) so that you can produce your own.There are 66 pages ('Songs') of patterns comprising of the aforementioned 'Measure A', Measure B' and 'Break'. Measure B is usually a derivative of Measure A (with change for beat variation) and the Break naturally breaks (a 'bridge' so to speak) the beat whilst adding variation too.The genres include:* Rock* Funk* Rhythm & Blues* Ballad* Pop* Reggae* Disco* Afro-Cuban* Blues* Swing* Shuffle* Smba* Bosa-Nova* Twist* Ska* EndingsGreat book and well worth the money. This will no doubt boost my skills in creating beats and tunes as a whole.My only gripe is that each box in the grids is not numbered 1 - 16. I feel I really need this so that I can reference the step on my Volca Sample, so I'm having to write these in with a pencil otherwise I'd have to count squares in the grid. A sore oversight, but one I can live with.Recommended!

Good book to learn. Very easy to understand

Full of rhythms that work great

Good

It seems obvious to me that somebody should compile this book. All credit to Rene-Pierre Bardet for doing so.Back when I bought my first drum machine, the next thing I needed, after reading the manual, was some patterns to program into it. It's not easy for a novice to just listen to other peoples music and figure out how the percussion works and this book gives you a library of patterns ready to go. But, with 15 years of experience under my belt how come I still bought this book? Well, for the same reason that I have a book of guitar chords: most of the time I use the same old chords/drum patterns that I'm familiar with but other times I want something new and what could be easier than having a library of them that you can just dip into?The title worried me a little before I bought it: 200 is such a nice round number don't you think?In fact the 200 'patterns' might more accurately be called 200 'bars' or 'measures' and they are split into groups of 3 where each group contains a measure A, B, and a break pattern. The idea is that you use the A and B patterns in various combinations interspersed with breaks. These groups of 3 are arranged as 5 Rock, 15 Funk, 5 Rhythm and Blues, 5 Ballad, 5 Pop, 5 Reggae, 5 Disco, 5 Afro-Cuban, 2 Blues, 3 Swing, 2 Shuffle, 3 Samba, 2 Bossa Nova, 1 Cha-Cha, 2 Twist, and 1 Ska.You could argue that comes to 66 patterns but bear in mind that each has 3 measures and you see that 3 x 66 = 198 (the remaining 2 patterns are a couple of measures to be using as 'endings'). However, as stated earlier the idea is that you can use the groups of 3 in various combinations so with each group of 3 you can just use measure A on it's own repeated over and over. You could do the same with measure B. Then you could have measure A followed by B repeating in a 2 bar combination. Then how about AAAB or any other combination? Add the break pattern into the equation and you see that each group of 3 can be combined in numerous ways with the result that there are a lot more than 200 patterns in this book.One other thing that occurred to me was that maybe a disk with the patterns on it as midi files using the GM drum format might have been helpful to some but then I guess there are just as many people to whom it would have been useless and would have just increased the price of the book.As it stands I'm inclined to think that there isn't any good reason why anyone with a drum machine, or anything else you can program rhythms in to, should not have this book in their library.

This is quite a good book for someone who is new to drum machine programming. It covers most basics with two patterns for style i.e. A & B plus a fill.All the steps are based on 16 measures. It would have been nice if the grids were numbered 1-16, buts that my only criticism of this book.