The composer writes:
I began 'Little BeatPad Boy' by transcribing The Little Drummer Boy from my head into NotePad. I figured out the melody in the Piano view, and then switched to the Score view to tidy up the rhythms and work out some chords and a descant (the part David Bowie sings in that duet with Bing Crosby). The descant didn't make it into the final mix, but it was good to have it just in case.

Once I had the melody all worked out I switched over to BeatPad and plotted out each bar of the melody in seven patterns in bank "A" (A1 through A7). The melody is actually twelve bars long, but I was able to repeat patterns A1, A2 and A3 to fill out the melody (try whistling The Little Drummer Boy to yourself and you'll hear the repetition). To finish up the "A" bank I created a fill pattern in A8 that just played a counterpoint rhythm on the tonic (in several octaves).

Using BeatPad's drag and drop feature I then copied each pattern from bank "A" into bank "B" and un-tied all of the steps to make another version of the melody with the pitch sounding on every sixteenth note. For flavor I changed the octaves of a few steps with the handy octave switches. So far this was all done using just the Palm speaker.

I plugged the Palm Vx I was using into a Yamaha MU-15 sound module (using a Palm V HotSync Cable from Palm and the miniMusic Palm-to-MIDI interface) and turned on MIDI playback in BeatPad so that I could hear all of the drum tracks along with the melodic tracks. I built up an elaborate percussion pattern in A8 by tapping drums on and off as the melody played and then copied various parts of it into the other patterns. Using the drum grid this was simply a matter of a few taps on each pattern. This way, as the full melody is played you hear various portions of the rhythm section appear over the twelve bars giving the impression of a much longer drum sequence than just one bar.

I did this again for the second bank using a different set of drum sounds (many MIDI tone modules, like the Yamaha MU-15 or the Swivel Systems SG20 offer multiple drum "banks" with different types of sounds in each). Once this was done I practiced performing the song a couple times which would be easier than piecing together all of the sections in an editing program. It also let me improvise some in real time which added a nice touch.

After a few minutes I was confident that I could play it all the way through. I used a patch cable to go from the headphone jack on the MU-15 to the audio in port on a Power Mac G3. I used a shareware program called Ultra Recorder to capture my performance as an AIFF file (this is the same type of audio format used on CDs). I hit record on the Mac and hit play on BeatPad and went through my patterns. I actually started in the "fill pattern" with all of the drums turned off and then used the track solos and mutes to slowly build up a sparse drum texture. I played through bank "A" twice and Bank "B" once and left the fill pattern, B8, playing for a while at the end with a few improvized changes again.

The first take went great so I only had to record once. The only tricky part was when I had to change from bank A to bank B and also change the drum kit in time for the downbeat of B1; it was only three taps to make during the last bar of the melody, so I probably worried about it more than needed. Otherwise, the way BeatPad automatically waits for the down beat to change patterns made the process almost impossible to screw up. Everything was automatically in sync.

Once the track was recorded on the desktop I decided to spruce it up a bit. I imported the AIFF into Cakewalk Metro and made two copies of the track. I applied a couple filters to the copied tracks (mostly some distortion, flange, and a swept bandpass filter). This way I could bring those effects in or out over the course of the song. I brought out more and more of the effected tracks as the piece goes on to build the texture over time.

Finally, I grabbed a sample of a guy counting to three (pulled of the beginning of a Mojo Nixon tune), and a recording of my sister's cat meowing. The cat sound I opened in SoundHack (freeware!) to do some time stretching (20 x original) and dropped it an octave or two. A couple versions of this cat sound make up most of the extra sound effects in the song. I had two different versions of it stretched (using two different algorithms... I don't remember which ones) and I also used it forward and backwards (honestly, no difference in the sound, but it gave me some variations of phrasing) with a couple of the same plug in filters in cakewalk.

The very first sounds you hear in the song are the counting and the cat noise ("meow" is no longer appropriate). I scattered the cat and counting samples over three monophonic tracks in Metro. One was panned hard right, one centered, and one hard left. By overlapping samples on these three tracks I was able to get a lot of stereo space between the speakers. Listen to it with headphones!

No reverb was used in the making of this song! Some of the more intense sounds are noticably different after the mp3 compression, but we don't have enough bandwidth to post a larger file.

Certainly the desktop tools added the finishing touches to 'Little BeatPad Boy', but using miniMusic NotePad and BeatPad made the generation of the melodic and percussion tracks a breeze.