Short, practical guides on drum programming, groove, sampling and lo-fi, written by Mani Deïz, a French hip-hop producer making beats since 1998. Every guide uses real step grids and settings you can copy, and every one of them can be followed in Shuffle Drummer, the free drum machine, sampler and groovebox that runs in your browser.
The complete beginner's path: tempo, drums, swing, a sample, a bass line, a mix, an export. Thirty minutes, no software to install.
What a swing percentage actually moves, why 50% is straight and 66% is a triplet, how much to use per genre, and how to hear it.
Six classic hip-hop grooves as 16-step grids with ghost notes, velocities and swing settings, from the basic skeleton to the drunk two-bar.
Five chopping techniques: equal slices, transient chops, the two-chop flip, pitching down, and removing the drums from a loop.
Tempo, a dusty kit, a pitched-down chop, lazy drums, and the exact degradation chain: 12-bit, cassette, vinyl, tape. Also en français.