Nerve

Once you start producing electronic music, drums will be your first concern. This is a good thing, since drums are the backbone of most electronic dance styles, and having drums that are badly produced and/or arranged usually means zero engagement from any possible audience.

Luckily, any DAW you choose will offer you enough tools to start and complete this part of your composition. If you ever come to the conclusion that it’s not enough, you can always get a virtual drum machine such as Nerve.

If you’ve tried to sequence drums in a DAW before, then you won’t have any problem working with Nerve. The ever-working step sequencer will start producing sound as soon as you choose a drum kit and adjust the velocity of the first drum (it’s usually the kick drum). The plugin will be permanently synced to its host BPM, so you won’t get any tempo adjustment options.

What you will notice is that the selection that comes with Nerve sounds great. You can also add your samples to the mix, but at first, it’s probably better to just explore this plugin’s sonic capabilities. There are 16 sounds in every kit, and every one of them can be easily modified with an envelope that you drag directly over the waveform.

For each drum and effect sound, you can adjust parameters such as cutoff, resonance, pitch, pan, gate, and latency. Basically, Nerve allows you to sculpt every drum sound until you imbue your pattern with a proper personality.

Nerve comes with many presets which you can explore, allowing you to understand how patterns for certain music styles are created. If you want to do more with your percussion sounds than your DAW allows then you should give this drum machine a try.