What music uses drum programming?

Answer 1

Now days... 99% of it?

Well, not quite that much. However, almost anything that is produced in a low - mid cost professional recording studio these days will have drums either replaced or re-enforced by MIDI triggered drum samples. Mind you the technology has gotten so good that each hit the drummer played on the recording can be made to trigger a better pre-recorded drum hit from a sound bank. this ensures that any miss hits or dud notes can be replaced from a sound bank of pre-recorded perfect hits. (some producers/engineers working on a budget will record with a cheap kit & mics or electric kit and sound replace it with better samples recorded at a better studio. Some will record their own samples throughout the session if they are getting a good sound and just use the programming/triggering technology for re-enforcement and gaining consistency in the performance. This also facilitates more editing techniques to be employed to tighten up the drummers performance. The average music consumer has become more sensitive to timing issues since the use of click tracks and DAW specific editing techniques have become the norm for recordings and therefore there is a bit of a cycle going on where music is becoming more and more quantised/compressed and generally flattened out at the demand of the consumer who wants to listen to a recording with "better production". This isn't to say every studio is doing this. some styles of music like Jazz, Big Band, Afro-Cuban & world music would not work with this kind of production style but most contemporary music from Dance/R&B/Hip-Hop/Dubstep to Metal/Rock/Pop/Punk/Grunge/Indy bands are using this kind of drum programming to enhance:

*The speed and efficiency of their recordings

*The tightness of the performance

*Editing techniques

*More sound manipulation options (the trigger points created can be made to trigger any sound samples)

*eliminate problems with extraneous recording room noise

*eliminate drummers/studio musician costs

*Save time gating, EQing, Compressing badly recorded drums (you'll spend less time and achieve a better sound doing this to the pro-recorded sample packs

*unique un-natural/un-playable drum parts

Lots of R&b, Hip-Hop/Rap music is just dotted into the DAW in MIDI or via sample pad There is heaps more ways to use this stuff and many more reasons it's used but those are the main ones.

Here are some main umbrella genres that use the techniques i've described.

Dance - Everything from Italian pop to K pop, J pop, brintey, gaga and in between

Electro - House, Gabba, Dubstep etc

Heavy metal - Almost anything 90's onward

Pop Punk - bands like the offspring, living end, greenday started using these techniques in the 90's to beef up their sound.

Rock - Nickleback, Audio Slave, Chilli peppers etc

Pop - all of it now days

It was a black market of producers selling drum loops performed in the studio onto tape then cut and spliced to grid in different tempo's to create loops. by the 80's productions were getting big MIDI was being invented. Basically, producers needed a better solution than cutting loops on tape that would degrade over time the more you spliced it and played it back. Eventually came drum machines & loop stations/samplers/sample pads and then eventually DAW's and the editing/programming/editing/production techniques i've done my best to describe above.