#000566
The Art of Digital Drumming
Steve Wilkes, Steve De Furia, and Joe Scacciaferro
A practical, mid-1980s guide to making music with the then-new tools of digital percussion — drum machines, MIDI, and electronic pads. Issued as a book-and-cassette pack, *The Art of Digital Drumming* splits its attention two ways: it teaches non-drummers how to program convincing grooves using simple 'rhythm maps,' and it shows drummers with electronic percussion controllers how to reach beyond rhythm into melody, bass lines, chords, and full arrangements. There is advice on song construction — where fills and ties belong — and a companion cassette demonstrating every example. Written by authors steeped in the emerging world of MIDI, it captures a moment when drum programming was becoming central to popular music and players were figuring out how to make machines feel human. As a how-to it is dated in its specific technology, but its musical thinking about groove and structure remains sound.
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The authors
Steve De Furia and Joe Scacciaferro were prolific authors of 1980s MIDI and synthesizer manuals (the "Ferro Technology" series), among the first to explain the new digital music tools to working musicians. Steve Wilkes contributed the drummer's perspective. Together they aimed to bridge the gap between traditional percussion and machine-based rhythm programming.
The book
The Art of Digital Drumming (Hal Leonard, 1986) is a book-and-cassette method covering drum-machine programming for non-drummers and melodic/harmonic playing for drummers using percussion controllers, with recorded demonstrations of every exercise.
How it has aged
The specific gear — early drum machines, cassette tapes, mid-1980s MIDI — is now vintage, and no one buys this to learn a current workflow. What endures is the musicianship underneath: how grooves are built, how to place fills, how to think about arrangement. Read as a historical document of the digital-percussion revolution, and for its still-useful ideas about feel and song construction, it retains value even as its hardware references have passed into nostalgia.
For more context
Pair with the authors' other MIDI titles and with modern electronic-drum and DAW guides.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Steve Wilkes, Steve De Furia, and Joe Scacciaferro
- Publisher
- Hal Leonard
- Year
- 1986
- ISBN
- 9780881888690
- Shelf
- Music
- Location
- Colorado