I got my start on tracker software in the late 90s. I got meticulous about drum fills, and custom patterns that had little nuances so that it wasn't just the same loop playing for three to five minutes.

In the early 2000s, I joined a punk band at their drummer, and over a couple of years, got to be pretty okay at it.

When, a few years later, I found myself in front of a drum machine again (the Tempest mentioned in this article) I suddenly found the idea of "writing beats" to be absurd. I still recorded patterns, but most of the time, I was tapping them in, in real time. I reflected on how silly it was doing things how I used to, now that I could just... Play the drum beat

I once built myself a parametric real-time rhythm sequencer - a little black box with knobs and buttons and lights and an LCD screen, which spat out MIDI notes to drive a drum machine - because that seemed easier than either learning to play the drums or learning to program drum patterns.