Minimal knowledge

[hydrogen]

listen to music. You can learn quite a bit about drums if you listen to other sequences.

Another thing is to pick up a chord/scale book. This will help you get some basic notes to work with and help you stay in key. You can find references to chords and scales online...
http://www.apassion4jazz.net/keys.html

As far as finding minimal sounds... Really learning about synthesis is a good place to start. Really dig into that subtractor, its quite a fun synth and you can make some really nasty sounds with it. Try playing a chord on the default patch and tweak the low pass filter on it at the same time.