It took a bit to settle on the drum resolution for 2026, but I finally settled on it. I am going to work on drum pads or "finger drumming," as some call it. I ordered an AKAI LPD8, which is a tiny portable drum pad setup I can use on iPad, Mac, and even iPhone.

It's not like I don't know how to drum on drum pads. I just am not that fast and smooth at it. It would be nice to be able to have the option of playing drum pads at shows where the place is too small to have a drum kit.

The next step for this resolution is to determine what success looks like. It is kind of hard to determine right now because I think I need a day or two with the drum pads to get to know them. I want to say being able to play a 1000s of cats song from beginning to end is the goal. I don’t know if that goal is too easy or not until I spend a chunk of time with them.

I've also been doing some rumination about parameters. With anything that can play samples, the options are infinite. You can literally play any drum kit or drum machine ever invented. I want to eliminate that kind of choice and just get down to playing.

This means picking a couple of kits and just pretending all the other ones don't exist. So I've chosen an analog kit option and a digital kit option. I will be "stuck" with these two for 2026.

The digital kit will be the CR-78. It is a drum machine from 1978, which I love. You'll know it when you hear it in a bunch of hits from the late 70s and early 80s.

For an analog drum sound, I am limiting the choice to my kits. I can use any drum sound that is me hitting the drum. It can be from old albums, or I can sample myself.

Applications are infinite as well. I am narrowing it down to a couple to just get rid of choice paralysis. The two apps will be Patterning and Koala. Both are extremely well-made Apple apps that I have loved for a while. I am really stoked to mess around with them using actual drum pads.