Ah, right. Well every time I search eBay for "drum machine" I get a whole bunch of results for the same books. "200 Drum Machine Patterns" and others, like the ones smutek has linked to. Eventually, I was wondering around the 'net one sunny afternoon, when, low and behold, I came across a couple of them laying on the ground wrapped up in an archive file. Can't remember how or where I got them, but I got them. They are not bad, even though one of them was written by someone named Ray F. Badness!
To be fair, Badness gets a good write-up if you do a search on him, right down to his choice of mullet-styling being okayed by mullet aficionados.
The last one I looked through had a good amount about the finer points of writing a drum pattern before presenting them and a step-by-step to building a song. Stuff like that may seem obvious, but I've mentioned to a guitarist friend, who couldn't work out why his beats were too busy when it came to putting a bassline over them, that drummers only have two hands and two feet (he replied that some drummers only have one arm, smartarse
). He
Personally I'd love to find some examples on sequencing the melodic stuff, particularly how people approach sequencing things like the Berlin School sound.
I studied music theory at school, have played in a concert band and a rock band and I was hopeless at writing my own melodies, until I got drunk and messed up playing other people's music. That's when it dawned on me, improvisation is a series of deliberate mistakes. When thinking about that while programming a melody, I have better results. I'm still better at playing than composing, but I'm not as bad any more
