DATSUNN: Habits That Make Better Beats

The Art of the Flip

DATSUNN explains how, as a drummer, he originally thought he had to play everything from scratch. When he discovered sampling music, however, he realised he could build new things from what already exists. “There’s creativity in how you flip sound”, he says. “Not just how you perform it.” 

In sampling, a “flip” means taking a phrase or beat that already exists and turning it into something different. It’s about reworking a piece of music until it feels like yours. “You might take a two-second moment from an old record and build a whole new track from it”, he explains.

Flips can be created in several ways – typically by slicing a sample and mapping it across keys, or editing within a DAW, step sequencer, or tracker. But for DATSUNN, with his drummer’s instinct, pads were the obvious route. 

A Finger-Drumming Epiphany

Finger-drumming didn’t start as a performance style for DATSUNN; it began as an interim solution. “I remember moving into an apartment where I couldn’t play drums anymore”, he remembers. “So my wife got me my first 16-pad controller. It was an M-Audio Trigger Finger. Learning to play it was a big door-opener for me. I was figuring out how to recreate what I did behind a kit, but on pads.” 

Finger-drumming by necessity turned out to be much more than a temporary fix. He realised that later, when his band flew to Europe for a run of shows and disaster struck. Their bass player was turned away at the airport over a passport issue, leaving the remaining two musicians with a slot to fill and no bass section. “So I chopped up our backing tracks – intro, verse, chorus – and played them in real time”, DATSUNN says. “At the end of the set, the host asked us to keep playing. My guitarist was packing up, so I dropped this D’Angelo flip, and the whole room went off!”

That moment was the start of everything that followed. “It was like a switch. I realised I didn’t have to choose between drumming and production – I could merge them.” What began as a workaround in a hotel room became the foundation of DATSUNN’s live sets: chopping samples, triggering them via pads. “I didn’t want to just hit play on loops. I wanted to play the samples and the drums, to have that freedom to improvise. It keeps the performance alive.”

Digging in Detroit

When it comes to finding samples, DATSUNN still likes getting his fingers dusty on occasion. Growing up in Windsor, Ontario, he’s just a ten-minute drive from Detroit. “You can walk into any record shop there, hit the soul section, and find gold,” he says. “Nothing replaces that.”

But like many modern producers, he also leans on digital sources. “I started using Tracklib around 2017,” he explains. “It still has that digging feeling – discovering music you’ve never heard – but you can clear the rights properly. That was important to me because I wanted to release music without worrying about rights.”

Inside DATSUNN’s Melodics Lessons

DATSUNN recently collaborated with Melodics to design finger-drumming lessons for Push 3 (they also work with previous versions of Push). The focus is on feel, groove, timing, and that subtle sense of swing that can’t easily be notated. “One of the lessons, Patience, is all about the left hand,” he says. “It’s about learning to play with the metronome, not just perfectly on top of it. There’s a difference.”

He credits the Melodics format for making that kind of training approachable. “What’s cool about Melodics is how it turns practice into something you want to do,” he says. “It’s structured, but it feels like a game. You’re scoring points, improving accuracy, you’re developing real coordination. It’s such a clever way to teach rhythm because it keeps you engaged.”

He’s also realistic about what holds players back. “Everyone wants to skip straight to the flashy stuff, but it’s the fundamentals that matter. If you spend ten minutes a day practising rudiments on Melodics, you’ll notice a huge difference in your timing and control.”

In the Pocket: Where the Groove Lives

DATSUNN laughs, remembering advice from an old sound engineer friend. “He used to call every over-the-top fill a ‘look at me’ moment. That stuck with me. You don’t need to play fast to be impressive. Just make it feel right.”

Again, this comes down to mastering the basics. “The pocket is what matters”, DATSUNN explains. 

Playing in the pocket means locking tightly into the groove, keeping a steady, consistent rhythm that sits well with the other instruments, especially the bass. It’s about timing, feel, and restraint rather than speed or complexity. “The best players are the ones who can sit in a groove for ages and make it feel good”, DATSUNN says.

Finding Flow with Push 3

DATSUNN has recently shifted some of his work to Push 3. “Ableton Live has always been my home base,” he says. “I got a Push 3 this year, and it hasn’t left my desk since. The pads feel great, and the 64-pad layout opens up so many new ways to chop samples. It lets me think differently.”

He approaches learning Push 3 the same way he once learned mixing consoles. “When I was in school, the teacher said, ‘just learn one channel strip.’ Once you know that, you can figure out the rest. That’s how I treat Push. Learn the small sections, one at a time. Don’t get overwhelmed by everything it can do.”

For beginners, he suggests starting simple: “Load a drum break, then chop a musical sample in Simpler and jam over it. You’ll get results quickly, and you’ll start to understand how rhythm and melody fit together. Use the Capture function to grab your best takes. It keeps things spontaneous.”

Cultivating a Zero-Friction Workflow

One of the most interesting takeaways from our talk with DATSUNN centred on the slightly less glamorous subject of housekeeping. Not vacuuming and dishes, but the kind that happens in a studio. It’s the quiet, practical stuff: tidying up your sessions, labelling cables, keeping templates ready to go. Those tasks that, for some, can feel like an unwelcome distraction from making music.

But DATSUNN reveals how those everyday studio chores can give you an edge. He calls it a building “zero-friction workflow” – a way of working that removes anything that slows him down. “I keep a template ready in Live so I can jump straight in,” he says. “Drum racks, Simpler tracks, my go-to effects – it’s all preloaded. I don’t want to be setting up every time. I want to hit record.”

The principle extends to his space. Every cable is labelled, every instrument has a home, and the cameras are always ready to roll. “During the pandemic, I’d spend so much time setting up that by the time I was ready, I didn’t feel like jamming anymore,” he admits. “Now everything’s patched in, so if I want to record something, I can just do it.”

It’s not just about being tidy, it’s about keeping momentum. With a young family, DATSUNN knows how rare uninterrupted time can be. “When you have kids, you’ve got to grab the moments when they come,” he says. “If I’ve got fifteen minutes, I want to be recording in one.”

For him, organisation isn’t a chore; it’s the hidden side of creativity. The less time spent fighting the setup, the more headspace there is for ideas. “It’s all about removing barriers,” he says. “The faster you can get from the spark to actually recording, the more honest the music feels.”