Programming Beats by Hand: A Keyboardist Builds Her Own Drum Machines

For a generation of indie musicians raised on garage-band software and pocket-sized samplers, the drum machine has become almost invisible, a quiet utility humming behind every chorus. Few artists make the device the centre of the conversation again, yet a small wave of keyboardists is doing exactly that, trading loops and presets for hand-coded patterns and soldered circuits. One of them, a Montreal-based composer and producer who prefers to be known simply by her stage name, has spent the past four years designing the rhythm section of her records from the ground up, line by line. The result is a body of work that sounds less like a band and more like a living organism, one where every kick and snare is treated as a melody in its own right.

Her approach lands at a moment when Australian audiences are rediscovering the joy of raw, unquantised music. From the Laneway Festival circuit in Melbourne to listening rooms tucked behind pubs in Newtown and Fitzroy, listeners are asking where the human has gone in modern production. When she plays a string of east coast dates later this year, including a slot at the Brisbane Powerhouse and a residency at a Brunswick warehouse, the questions on everyone's lips will be less about her synth choices and more about why she refuses to let a sequencer make her decisions for her. Coverage of her work has appeared on https://ladyindie.com/, and the conversation has only grown louder since.

A childhood in front of a portable keyboard

The story begins not in a studio but in a basement rec room in suburban Quebec, where a battered Yamaha PSR sat next to a stack of records borrowed from the local library. She taught herself to read chord symbols by ear before she turned twelve, and by fifteen she was the only musician in her high school band willing to play the drum pads on a borrowed arranger. That early exposure, half keyboardist and half reluctant percussionist, planted the seed for what would later become an obsession.

"I never felt the drums in the band were an instrument I could really play, because I was stuck behind a stand," she explains. "But when I discovered the sequencer on the keyboard, it felt like I could finally be the drummer too. The machine gave me a band in a box, and I could program it the way I wanted to be heard." The phrase comes up often in conversation, and it hints at a broader philosophy that runs through her catalogue: the drum machine is not a substitute for a player but an extension of one.

Inside the kit: analog boxes, custom firmware and a lot of patience

Walk into her studio and the first thing you notice is the absence of a computer screen. A small wooden desk holds a Roland TR-08, an Arturia DrumBrute, and a pair of pedals she built herself from kits sold by a small workshop in Mile End. Each device has been opened, mapped and rewritten so that its internal sequencer behaves a little differently from the factory version. She programs patterns step by step, often with a single finger, the soft click of each button pressed audible over the talkback mic.

The process is slow by modern standards. A single bar of hi-hat can take an entire afternoon, especially when the groove calls for the kind of micro-timing imperfections that made 808s feel human in the first place. "I want every ghost note to be a choice, not a probability," she says, paraphrasing a line from a long-running thread on a vintage synth forum. The dedication has begun to attract attention from producers in Sydney and Perth, several of whom have reached out to ask whether she might consider selling custom firmware or running a workshop during her next visit.

The Montreal roots that shaped her sound

Montreal's independent scene has long been fertile ground for the kind of cross-pollination that defines her work. She grew up playing in the same all-ages venues that launched Arcade Fire and Godspeed, soaking up the city's habit of folding folk harmonies into krautrock-length drum workouts. The local label circuit, particularly the female-led split singles label, gave her one of her earliest breaks by including a track on a 7-inch compilation pressed in a run of three hundred, and the culture around that small pressing still shapes the way she builds a song.

She still rehearses in the same converted laundromat where she wrote her first record, and the slightly uneven tile floor still finds its way into the sound of her snare drums, picked up by the ribbon mic she leans against a folding chair. Visitors to the room often remark on the smell of solder and old tape, a combination she refuses to mask because, as she puts it, the gear is supposed to smell like it has been used.

Why hand-programming still beats a loop

The temptation to drop a pre-made loop into a session is real, and she is the first to admit she has used them in the past. What changed her mind was a residency at an arts collective in Berlin, where she watched a group of techno producers argue for two days about whether a single shuffled hat could be considered composition. She came home convinced that the small decisions inside a beat matter as much as the chords above it, and she has not imported a loop since.

Australian audiences will recognise a similar conversation happening in their own scene. Triple j unearthed artists regularly cite the influence of drummers like the late Joyce Manressa and producers working out of rehearsal barns in Meredith, where the boundary between folk and electronic has been quietly dissolved. Her argument is not that loops are bad but that they flatten the conversation between a musician and a song. "If the drum machine is talking to me, I want it to use my vocabulary, not someone else's," she says.

Touring in Australia and what the road teaches a one-woman band

Touring as a solo act comes with a unique set of problems that her drum machine habit does not always solve. There is the question of how to translate a multi-layered studio record into something that can be played live without a laptop, and there is the question of how to keep the gear alive across long-haul flights through Perth and Cairns. She has settled on a touring case that fits beneath an airline seat, built around a single sequencer and a compact mixer she can run from a power bank during soundcheck.

The Australian leg is also an excuse to test some of the gear she has built but never played in front of an audience. Among the surprises she is bringing on tour is a four-channel drum module she assembled from a kit ordered online in Adelaide and soldered with parts sourced from a hobby shop in Glebe. "If it catches fire, at least I will have a funny story for the merch table," she jokes, then adds, more seriously, that failure in front of a crowd has always taught her more than success in the studio.

Practical lessons from a programmer who refuses to be a programmer

For musicians curious about stepping away from loops and into the slow craft of pattern building, she offers a handful of practical suggestions drawn from her own notebooks. They are less rules than habits, and each one can be tried without buying a single piece of new gear.

• Start with a single drum hit, then build a one-bar loop around it before adding anything else. A groove has more room to breathe when the kick is not fighting the snare for attention.
• Mute the bass and the keys for an hour and listen only to the drums. The patterns that survive that test usually belong in the song.
• Recycle an old preset but change one parameter by hand each time you use it. Over a record, those tiny edits add up to a vocabulary.
• Keep a notebook of every pattern you finish, even the bad ones. The archive becomes a map of how your playing evolves.
• If a beat feels finished in ten minutes, it probably is not. Put it away and come back the next morning with fresh ears.
• Learn to program a swing setting by ear rather than by percentage. Numbers describe a feel, they do not make one.

The list is short by design. She believes that the best habits are the ones a musician can carry onto a stage, onto a long flight, or into a Brunswick warehouse at midnight, when the audience is half-asleep and the song has to do all the work.

Her message to anyone watching her tour, or simply listening at home, is that the drum machine is not the enemy of intuition. It is a place to put it down, line by careful line, until the rhythm starts to feel less like a beat and more like a sentence in a longer conversation. The patterns she codes will keep changing, but the patience behind them is the part she hopes listeners take home with them.