Making your own drum beats using MidiDrum

Posted on July 17, 2008 at 5:19 am

Do you need to play along an endless drum loop for practice? Do you have drum rhythms in your head that you want to save as a cell phone ring tone? Do you want to unleash the hidden John Bonham in you? If you say yes to one of these questions then Mididrum is for you.

Mididrum lets users simulate real acoustic and electric drum sounds. You can download it for free on download.com It is less than 400kb overall and will not eat up much CPU resource when you run it – very very neat!

Its graphical interface is straightforward and intuitive for users with a little music knowledge:

When you downloaded the file all you have to do is unzip it, you don’t have to install it unlike most software that come with an installer. To run the program, just double click the MidiDrum.exe file:

Its help file is a .chm (compiled HTML) file that comes with the software (click MidiDrum.chm to open it):

There is nothing much on the help file since it only uses a single window to do everything.

Making the Beat:

When creating drum beats it is best to start with the kick drum (also known as bass drum) pattern. To start making a kick drum, choose 35: Acoustic Bass Drum on the instruments panel:

Then start to fill the checkboxes on the beats along the bass drum line:

Click Play to listen to the sound of the Bass Drum. Listen to the pattern and make necessary changes to the tempo (using the tempo slider) if necessary. Once you are satisfied with the bass drum pattern, let’s add the back beat using the snare drum sound:

If you have followed the steps above you should have a drum pattern (also known as drum groove) that sounds like this midi file:

sample 1 sample 1

Alright, that might be a lame drum groove and not good enough to inspire you to make your own beats. I will up the ante a little by adding another instrument called the hihat:

The pattern shown above will sound like this:

sample 2 sample 2

Now this groove is a little more complex than the first one. It has what musicians call a syncopation wherein a beat is played where it is not supposed to be played. Notice that I moved the bass drum from step 5 to step 6 and the snare drum from step 6 to 7:

The shifting of the beats created an unexpected effect and thus giving it a little syncopated “funky” feel to it. This is only one way of adding color to a drum groove. Depending on your creativity you can do much more with a very simple tool like MidiDrum.

You can make drum patterns that you can play along during practice or actual play. The export format is standard MIDI so if you transfer it to your cell phone it will be able to play it as your ringtone (but this is assuming that your phone can play MIDI, if your phone’s model is 3 years old or newer then chances are it plays MIDI files).

For more advanced users who want to make more complex rhythms, checkout the two products below: