14. Listen to drumming on records to pick up the sort of patterns and fills that get used in a particular musical style. Careful listening can make you realise that your assumed ideas about a particular style of drumming are actually quite wide of the mark. For instance, it's very easy to get into the habit of automatically plonking a heavy kick drum on the first beat of every bar - but there are a number of styles, notably reggae and jazz, in which the bass drum is often not played at all on the first beat.

15. Learn to read drum notation (if you already read music, it's dead easy) and look at transcriptions in drumming magazines and books; the more you know about playing the drums, the more accurately you'll be able to program realistic drum patterns.

16. Synth and drum machine sounds are usually made using samples of each instrument in isolation. Recording a real drumkit is a different matter, however; overhead or room mics are always used (usually in conjunction with close mics on individual drums) to pick up not only cymbals and toms, but the sound of the whole kit, along with a certain amount of room ambience. Programmed drum parts in their raw state can sound sterile and disjointed by comparison, because they lack this element. You can avoid this to a certain extent by taking care with panning - don't pan anything too hard left or right, and keep the bass drum in the centre of the field. You can also experiment with putting a room reverb on the drums to make them sound more coherent. I actually prefer using Opcodes OpPlate reverb for drums - it's a Plate reverb, rather than a room reverb, which lends itself to a very dense initial reflection and a short decay - perfect for making drums sound 'big' without losing their clarity (if you have OpPlate, here is a preset for it that I think is a good example - pop it in your 'Plug-in Settings>OpPlate' folder to access it.).

17. Beware, however, that synth programmers have a tendency to swathe every drum sound in a blanket of reverb. This may sound impressive when you're trying the instrument out in a music shop, but again, doesn't always represent the pinnacle of realism. Massive reverb does suit some styles of drumming (Def Leppard anyone?) but by no means all - and where it is used to excess on real drums, its effect is often to make them sound more artificial. Experiment with different depths and styles of reverb until you find something that sounds right. Don't be afraid to get really experimental and use different reverbs on different drums - this requires a heavy amount of discretion, but can be extremely effective when used properly (click here for an example).

8. Standard drum kit sound sets, particularly those conforming to the General MIDI drum map, suffer certain persistent problems. Perhaps the most obvious of these is the use of only three different hi-hat sounds - open, closed and pedal - when real drumming makes use of a continuous range of sounds from quiet to soft, from tight closed to open. A common device for creating effective build-ups into loud sections, for instance, is to open the hi-hat gradually over a bar or two, moving from a tight 'tsk' to a looser, splashy sound - which progression can't really be reproduced using only single open and closed sounds. There are also noticeable sonic differences between a hi-hat struck with the tip of the stick and with the shaft; real drummers do both, often alternately. Getting hold of a more comprehensive set of hi-hat samples, then, is an effective way to improve the authenticity of your sequenced drumming. You could even consider miking up and playing a real hi-hat over your sequenced kick and snare pattern. Some of the newer drum modules provide for more realistic hi-hat sounds - the Roland V series, in particular, come to mind.

19. Another problem with many sampled sound sets is that they do not reflect the ways in which the sound of real percussion instruments varies depending on the force with which they're struck. Giving a hi-hat or a cymbal a heavy bash produces a sound which is not only louder than a gentle tap, but quite different in timbre; the same is true of snares and other drums. If your sound set merely responds to velocity by making the sounds louder or quieter, you need to be careful how you use them (for instance, avoid trying to reproduce quiet cymbal washes if you only have samples of loud crashes). Most samplers, both software and hardware, will allow you to apply an EQ and other processing that respond to velocity (such as a filter that opens up the harder you hit a note), which will give you more of the timbre variations present in a real performance.