LearnGrooves Drum Machine Review

If there’s one musical element that’s fundamental to dance music, it’s the groove. Without a strong, solid beat at the base of your track, dance music might as well be a bunch of weird experimental noise. A good drum groove combines rhythmic patterns and timing with choice sample modulation, unique time signatures, and arrangement to create the kind of driving energy that makes dancers dance.

Unfortunately, the stock groove templates bundled within most popular DAWs can only do so much to help you achieve that kind of drive in your tracks. To really bring your tracks to life, you need to manually adjust choice elements of your drum programming. This can be as simple as playing a snare drum stroke slightly before or after the quantized grid to introduce a little extra drive, or it could involve adjusting the velocity of each individual hit to mimic the natural variability of an experienced drummer’s performance. Fortunately, there are some excellent free and paid tools available that can help you do just that.

For example, the free version of LearnGrooves offers a decent selection of pre-loaded drum kits that include a kick drum, snare drum, three toms, hi-hat, two crashes, a ride, and a china. This is a pretty solid set of samples that should suit most producers’ needs. If you need to expand on this, the full version of LearnGrooves is also a great option for those looking for even more sound options. It comes with a wide variety of different kits and drum sound variations, and it allows you to drag and drop audio files into your arrangements view to quickly audition them.

In addition to these features, the full version of LearnGrooves also includes a step sequencer that lets you lay out your beats on a grid, where each square or “step” represents a single drum sound. Activate the steps that you want to play and leave inactive ones blank for silence. The sequencer has a nice visual setup, where activated steps turn blue and inactive ones remain gray, to make it easy to follow the pattern you’re creating.

The sequencer also has LearnGrooves Drum Machine some useful features that you won’t find in some of the other more basic free drum machines, including a revamped song system that adds track selector buttons, and a probability step function for fills and flams. It’s also got built-in swing functionality for all your odd-timed parts and ideas.

IMEA Studio’s Groove Drum Synth is another excellent tool that can be used both as a plugin or a stand-alone app. It’s CPU efficient, offers independent outputs, and has a ton of features that would be of interest to any electronic musician. Among these are a Velocity Paint tool, MIDI learn, a loop export feature, and built-in effects (Chorus, Compressor, Delay, Filter, Flanger, Limiter, and Reverb).

Of course, the best tool of all may be your own imagination. That’s why it’s important to spend some time learning about different grooves and trying out new sounds. There are plenty of resources online, and many drummers have their own websites that you can check out for more information on specific beats and how to play them.