Drummy drums are super easy to use. Learn more in the FAQ below and become the next Beat Maker Revelation!.
Did you know? Prolonged exposure to noise at 85 decibels and above (or about as loud as a subway platform) can cause serious damage to your hearing, including problems like tinnitus: a condition that is challenging—and in many cases impossible—for even the best doctors to treat.
The creators of Drummy want you to know that nothing is more important to us than your health. We want you to be able to fully enjoy listening to music and using Drummy for as long as possible.
For that reason, be sure to educate yourself, take care of your hearing, and check your volume levels before spending the next five hours hooked on creating your amazing Drummy drum composition!
A drum machine—or rhythm machine—is a tool for making drum or beat sounds and compositions digitally, on your computer—no drum set required. You start by making one pattern of drum sounds or beats. Then, you can loop that pattern. It’s easy, and you can be as creative as you’d like.
On the other hand, a beat maker is a profession. Explore a career as a beat maker by leveraging your taste for catchy patterns. Drummy.io is an ideal tool to kickstart your journey.
A “figure” is like a musical note, but a little different. When you read typical music, the musical notes are written in a way that shows you how long each note should last: quarter notes are 1 beat, half notes are 2, whole notes are 4, and so on.
In Drummy, however, the “figure” isn’t really about how long a note should last. Instead, the figure tells Drummy how long it should wait before playing the next note.
In regular music, most musical notes are given note lengths that are in multiples of 2 (remember: half notes are 2 beats, whole notes are 4, and then of course you have eighth notes, sixteenth notes, and so on).
Well, the same is true in Drummy. Though you can enter whatever number you like in the figure box, Drummy works best when you enter numbers that are in powers of 2, so keep that in mind.
Changing the number in Drummy’s figure box can make your drum composition faster or slower, depending on what your BPM is set at.
BPM stands for “beats per minute,” and like figures, the number you set here can make your drum composition faster or slower. While changing the number in the figures box can change the speed of your composition, BPM is specifically for setting the speed of your composition.
Let’s put that all together—but pay attention, because here’s where it can get a little tricky!
Think of your drum composition as a cherry pie. 1 pie equals 1 minute. BPM is how many slices are in that pie, and figure is how many cherries are in each slice. If you have a lot of slices (a high BPM) and a lot of cherries (a high figure) that might be thousands of cherries...or a really fast song!
So remember, when you’re setting the figure, you’re telling Drummy how many sounds you want to happen per “beat”, and when you’re setting the BPM, you’re telling Drummy how many beats you want per minute.
As for length, this just indicates how long you want your composition to be. You can create a drum pattern that has up to 64 different sounds in it. You can also create a short, simple drum pattern with say, 4 sounds in it, and then—just multiple that 4-sound pattern 16 times over.
It’s up to you what kind of compositions you want to create with Drummy!
These buttons (at the top left and right of Drummy) are here to make creating drum beats easier and faster for you. The x2 button duplicates what you have, and the /2 button cuts it in half.
For example, say you want to make a song or drum pattern that is 32 notes long. (Remember, you can have up to 64 notes in a pattern on Drummy.) Rather than writing out every single note in your 32-note drum pattern, you can just write 8 notes, and then click x2 twice to double it to 16, then 32. Now you have a 32-note song...in just two clicks! Your original 8 notes will have been duplicated.
You can go back by clicking /2, which will cut it all in half, from 32 back down to 16 and then 8. But be careful: If clicking /2 makes you lose half your work, you won’t be able to get it back.
This is similar to /2 and x2, except rather than duplicating or halving your composition (such as doubling the notes you already have, to create repetitions or loops), “shrink” and “expand” actually doubles or halves both the length of your composition and the figure number: the length of the piece will be longer or shorter, but it won’t actually sound different, because you’re not duplicating any notes. Just spreading them out. The “expand” or “shrink” function essentially gives you more room or space to work with, or perhaps add notes between the notes you’ve already written.
For example: Let’s say you use Drummy to write a 4-note drum pattern. First, you set the length to 4 (because you only want 4 notes.) Then, you write your 4 notes.
Now, if you were to click x2, those 4 notes are going to be duplicated, and you’ll have a loop, where those 4 notes get repeated over and over.
If you click “expand”, however, the length of your composition will grow, but the 4 notes won’t duplicate—instead, they will spread out. You’ll have 8 notes, with the 4 notes you wrote spread out, and every other note in between will be empty.
But wouldn’t that make it sound different? Nope! Because the figure number has doubled. Confused? Review the answer above to the question “what is a figure,” then play around with Drummy to see what we mean.
You can use the backing track controls to add some musicality to your patterns. You just need to select a Root Note, a chord progression, and the progression fit
You can use Roman Numerals to write your own progression, or just select one from the list
Using the backing track tool can help you communicate better how a song wraps around a beat, without having to actually play a piano over your beats
The easiest way is to give your pattern a title and save it under favorites using the star button. If you want to share it or save it somewhere else, you can use the share function to send your composition away to new ears, which also means you can just share it with yourself and save it that way! Click the share button in the bottom right of Drummy. You’ll get a link you can copy and paste in a text to yourself, save in a notepad file, or wherever you’d like.
Conecting your MIDI device to Drummy.io can be an amazing experience! You will be able to map the sounds as you like, and if you enable the live composing, when you are playing a pattern and tap/click over the drumpad, or use your MIDI interface, the beats you play get added to the pattern
The Ryhtm Training section, where you can practice your beats, is also a great option to try out your MIDI device and practice your rudiments with precision