Drum Sequencing

Building beats in the step grid, and how drum steps relate to the rest of the sequencer.

Drum programming in Jam Club uses a step grid rather than the piano roll: each row is a drum voice, each column is a sixteenth-note step, and you build a pattern by toggling cells on and off. It is the fastest interface in the app for getting a rhythm down.

The grid

Steps are grouped in fours so the beats are visually obvious — you can see at a glance whether a hit lands on the downbeat or between beats, without counting cells. Each voice has its own colour, so a dense pattern stays readable, and a playhead column tracks the transport so you always know where in the loop you are.

Programming a beat

Click a cell to place a hit; click again to remove it. Because the grid updates live, the most productive way to work is with the transport running — toggle a step, hear the change immediately, keep or undo it.

A conventional starting point

  1. Kick on steps 1, 5, 9 and 13 — one per beat.
  2. Clap or snare on steps 5 and 13 — the backbeat.
  3. Hats filling the gaps, to establish the subdivision.

Then start taking things away. Removing the kick on beat 3 does more for a groove than adding a fill.

Loop length

The Drum Machine has its own beats-per-loop setting like any other instrument. Running a short drum loop underneath a longer melodic part is a cheap way to make a pattern feel like it develops without writing more notes.

Drum steps are notes

A lit step is stored as a note on the instrument's pattern, exactly like a note drawn in the piano roll. This is worth knowing because it explains why drum patterns behave identically to melodic ones everywhere else in the app: they occupy clip slots, respond to scene launches, sync to collaborators and are visible to the AI review on the same terms.

Where to go next