Online Drums

A drum kit and a drum machine in one page

ManyHand Online Drums is two instruments that share one sound engine. Up top is a 3D drum kit you play live — tap the drums, hit the keys on your keyboard, or plug in a MIDI drum kit. Below it is a drum machine: a step sequencer for all sixteen drums, where you paint a beat, play it back in a loop, and build a song from four patterns. Whatever the machine plays, the kit plays too, with a pair of sticks showing each hit.

Seven kits, modelled rather than sampled

Nothing is downloaded but the page. When it opens, every drum is built from the physics of the real thing: a drum head rings in the modes of a stretched circular membrane, its pitch dropping as the tension relaxes after a hard hit; snare wires buzz with the bottom head's motion; a cymbal is a bank of up to two hundred inharmonic partials with a wash of noise that darkens as it settles. Each drum is rendered at three strengths, in several takes, so a roll or a hi-hat run never machine-guns.

• Studio — a natural maple kit in a dry room, tight kick, crisp snare.
• Rock — bigger drums tuned low, hit harder, in a live hall with more compression.
• Jazz — small, high-tuned drums that ring open, a dark washy ride.
• Lo-fi — the studio kit through a dusty sampler: rolled-off highs, 12-bit grit.
• 808 — the classic analogue machine: booming kick, snappy snare, six-oscillator hats, cowbell and claves.
• 909 — the punchy house and techno machine, with its gritty low-resolution cymbals.
• Trap — a long, distorted 808 bass kick and crisp hats built for rolls.

Playing the kit

On a touch screen, tap the drums; several fingers can play at once. Where you tap matters: near the centre of a drum is a full hit, out towards the rim is softer; the outer ring of the snare is a side stick, the bell of the ride is the ride bell, and the edge of the hi-hat opens it. On a keyboard the sixteen drums sit on four rows, in the same places as the pads view:

Hold Shift while you hit for an accent. A closed or pedal hi-hat cuts off a ringing open one, as it does on a real kit.

Making a beat

1. Choose Ghost, Normal or Accent and click steps in the grid. Drag across a row to paint several at once; click a hit again with the same strength to remove it.
2. Set the tempo, or tap it with Tap. Turn up Swing for a shuffle and Human to loosen the timing and strength a little, as a drummer would.
3. Right-click or long-press a hit for its own settings: a roll of two to four hits (trap hi-hats), a chance so it plays only some of the time, and a nudge to push it ahead of or behind the beat.
4. Use patterns A to D for a verse, a chorus, a break. Press Song to chain them, and Fill for a tom fill into the next bar with a crash on the downbeat.
5. Click a drum's name to select it: set its level, pan, tuning, decay and how much room it gets, or fill the row in eighths or beats.

Over fifty grooves to start from

Open Beats for a library of grooves in nine families — rock, pop, funk and soul, hip-hop and trap, house, techno and drum & bass, Latin and Afro grooves, Indian rhythms such as keherwa, dadra, bhangra and garba, jazz swing and blues shuffles, and odd times like 5/4 and 7/8. Each comes with a main pattern and a variation, ready to play, change or record over.

Recording, saving and sharing

Press Rec and play: from a stop you get a bar of count-in, then everything you hit lands on the nearest step of the pattern while it loops. Save keeps a beat in this browser; Share copies a link that carries the whole beat inside it; Export writes a WAV (with a seamless-loop option for videos and loopers) or a MIDI file using the General MIDI drum map.

Questions

More music tools: Percussion Pads · Metronome · Tabla · Mridangam · Online Piano · DJ Mixer