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The drum track is an essential part to almost every type of electronic music whether it be Hip Hop, Trip Hop, House, Trance, Ambient, or Techno. It's what drives the melody and keeps a sense of movement throughout the track.

Most have a difficult time acquiring this skill, but it can be had if practiced daily. Commonly electronic music producers start out knowing nothing of drum programming, it can be difficult to emulate a real drummer at first, but it will come to you.

*You are going to need either a hardware of software sampler and samples to program your own drum track, these are vital tools for creating electronic music. The right drum sounds for the genre you are producing is a must, otherwise the track just wont fit with the rest of the song*

The first step would be to listen to your favorite tracks from a genre of choice. Try to transcribe the drum track and then sequence it in your sampler. Do this as much as possible, hopefully you will try to do this at least once a day, it will give you ideas when it comes to making your own drum track or loop and give an idea on how the track is built.

If you try this technique with many different genres, you will start to notice the different placements of hi-hats, snares, and bass drums in relation to the bar. It may be hard to hear this but if you need a visual you can buy a book on drumming which has drummers tab and can be used for writing a drum track.

To make the track sound as realistic as possible you are going to want to slightly vary the velocity for each drum hit and possibly skip quantizing if you want the track to be more organic which is more common in Hip Hop and Trip Hop than any other genre of electronic-type music.

*One last thing I'd like to point out is adding another hihat or percussive pattern on top of the main drum track. If you listen closely, the first bars of a song will just be the main drum track (bass drum, hihat, snare) and then as the song moves on there will most likely be a new hihat or percussive pattern that develops on top of it which adds more groove and rhythm.

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