Virtual Drum Kit

How to play it

Tap a drum or a cymbal to hit it. Use as many fingers as you like — each one is a separate stick, so a kick and a snare on the same beat sound together, the way they do when a drummer plays them. Three places on the kit do more than one thing, as they do on a real one: the snare’s metal hoop is a rimshot, the hi-hat plays closed in the middle and open on its outer ring, and the raised middle of the ride cymbal is its bell. The chips above the kit swap between a studio rock kit, a small jazz kit and an electronic drum machine.

On a computer keyboard, the kit is laid out left to right the way it is in front of you:

Hold Shift for an accent. Both hands fall on the home row: the left hand on the hi-hat and snare, the right hand on the toms and the ride, and a thumb on the space bar for the kick.

The parts of a drum kit

A standard five-piece kit is five drums and two or three cymbals, and each one has a job in a beat. Knowing the jobs is most of knowing how to play one.

• Bass drum (kick). The biggest drum, lying on its side and played with a pedal under the right foot. It is the bottom of the groove: in most pop and rock it lands on beat 1 and somewhere around beat 3.
• Snare drum. The drum between the drummer’s knees, with a set of metal wires stretched under its bottom head. The wires rattle on every hit, which is what makes its crack. It usually plays the backbeat — beats 2 and 4 — and a song’s feel lives in it more than anywhere else.
• Hi-hat. Two cymbals face to face on a stand, opened and closed with the left foot. It keeps time: eighth notes or sixteenths played by the right hand while the left hand plays the snare. Played closed it ticks; open, it hisses.
• Toms. Two mounted on the bass drum and one standing on the floor, tuned high to low. They are mostly for fills — the runs around the kit at the end of a phrase — and a few beats, like the tribal floor-tom grooves, are built on them.
• Crash cymbal. The accent: a big splash of noise on the first beat of a new section, usually together with the kick.
• Ride cymbal. The big, heavy one on the right. It does the hi-hat’s job with a different colour — a clear “ping” on each hit with a wash underneath — and in jazz it is where the time lives. Its bell is a louder, bell-like note used for accents.

Your first beat

Nearly every drummer starts on the same one, the basic rock beat, and nearly every song you know is built on some version of it. Count it out loud as “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”:

1. Hi-hat on every count — all eight of them, evenly. This is your clock.
2. Snare on 2 and 4. Together with the hi-hat on those counts.
3. Kick on 1 and 3, and — once that is steady — on the “and” after 3 as well.

Press Play beat under the kit with Rock selected, and that is exactly what you will hear, with the kit lighting each drum as it is hit. Then open Edit the beat and tap the word Snare: the loop stops playing the snare and the snare lights up gold at the moment it is your turn. Play it yourself, in time. When that feels easy, give the kick back to the loop and take the hi-hat instead — then two parts at once. Taking a groove apart one limb at a time is how drummers learn one, and slowing the tempo down first is not cheating.

The 9 beats in the loop

Each one is a pattern every working drummer knows, and each teaches something the others do not. None is copied from a recording — a backbeat on 2 and 4 belongs to everybody.

• Rock — the beat above, at 100 BPM. The starting point for everything else.
• Disco / pop — the kick on all four beats (“four on the floor”) and the hi-hat opening on every “and”. The open-close is the lesson.
• Funk — sixteenth notes on the hi-hat and quiet ghost notes on the snare between the backbeats. The small dots in the grid are the ghosts: play them barely touching the drum.
• Half-time — the snare moves from 2 and 4 to beat 3 only, so the song feels half as fast while the hi-hat keeps the same speed. A sound every heavy chorus uses.
• Hip-hop — a laid-back boom-bap with a little swing on the sixteenths, so the notes between the beats land slightly late.
• Shuffle — the beat is divided in three rather than two, and the middle of each three is left out: “1-a-2-a”. Blues and a lot of rock ’n’ roll live here.
• Jazz swing — the ride cymbal’s “ding, ding-a-ding, ding-a” pattern with the hi-hat pedal closing on 2 and 4, and the bass drum only just audible under it.
• Bossa nova — a side-stick click pattern over a steady bass-drum pulse, the Brazilian groove behind “The Girl from Ipanema” and a thousand others.
• Reggae one-drop — nothing on beat 1, and the kick and the rim together on beat 3. The missing downbeat is the entire style.

The last entry, Empty, is a blank grid for making your own. Whatever you build can be sent as a link with Copy link to this beat.

Why it sounds like a drum kit

Nothing here is a recording. Every hit is built from a model of the object being hit, which is why the first tap sounds instantly with nothing to download. A drum head is a stretched circular skin, and a skin does not vibrate in neat octaves the way a string does — its overtones sit at 1.59, 2.14 and 2.30 times the note, which is why a snare cracks instead of ringing a pitch. The pitch of a tom falls for the first few hundredths of a second after the stick lands, because the hit stretches the head tighter than it rests, and that falling “doom” is modelled too. The snare adds its wires as noise that starts a moment after the head moves them.

Cymbals are the hardest thing to fake, because a sheet of bronze rings in hundreds of unrelated frequencies at once. Each cymbal here is around a hundred of them, with the highest arriving a few milliseconds late the way a real crash blooms, over a wash of noise — and the hi-hat’s open ring is cut off the moment it is closed. Each sound is also rendered in several slightly different takes that the kit rotates through, so ten snare hits in a row do not sound like one hit copied ten times. The jazz kit is the same model with smaller, higher-tuned drums, looser snare wires and darker cymbals; the electronic kit models the circuits of a classic drum machine instead of the drums.

Got a real kit?

The drum tuner listens through your microphone while you tap around each head, and helps you even out the lugs so a drum rings with one clear note instead of a wobble. When the kit is tuned and it is your timing that needs the work, the online metronome has a gap trainer that drops the click out for a few bars, so you find out whether you are still on the beat when it comes back.

More instruments you can play here

The online handpan is the other instrument here you play with your fingertips, and the one where nothing you hit sounds wrong. The online xylophone is the pitched cousin of the drum kit: struck with sticks, and tuned. All the instruments are free to play in the browser.

Frequently asked questions