Not everybody has access to a hot drummer. Fortunately, there are some great programs available for laying down your drum tracks. Here are some general tips to keep in mind when using your computer to add drum tracks to a song.

The average song has 3 or 4 parts. Some may be more or less complex, but you should know how many distinct parts your song has before you open up your drum program.

Some drum programs are set up for multiple channels of different drum sequences. If you have 5 parts to your song, you might want 5 different drum parts.

Get drum setups on the right channels before you play the whole song. After the channels are set, it's easy to play your song from the beginning and manually change each drum set and tweak other settings on the fly. When you have your drums absolutely perfect, add it to the mix of your song in your favorite multi-track program. Then you're ready to polish it up, add some awesome effects if you want... and put your recording to bed.

If you want to expand your sample collection, there are free drum samples available on the internet and a wide variety of percussion sample CDs available.