Practising with a drum groove instead of a click teaches you to lock in with a band. This drum machine gives you 70 grooves in 13 styles: rock, pop, blues shuffles, funk and soul, reggae and ska, Latin, jazz, country, hip-hop, metal, waltzes and odd meters such as 5/4 and 7/8, Bollywood and folk grooves on dholak, dhol and manjira, and classic tabla thekas.
Every sound is synthesized in your browser, not played from recordings: kick, snare, hi-hats, cymbals, toms, percussion, the dayan and bayan of the tabla, the dholak’s two heads, the dhol and its tilli stick. The tabla is tuned like a real one, with its own Sa you can set to match your song’s key.
Each groove is shown on a grid you can change. Tap a step to make it normal, accented, a soft ghost note or silent, tap a sound’s name to mute it, or add any other sound as a new row. Tabla grooves also show their bols, the spoken syllables, with sam, tali and khali marked, and the current matra lights up as it plays.
Fills come every 4, 8 or 16 bars, or whenever you tap Fill, in the style of the groove: tom runs for rock, triplet fills for shuffles, dholak and dhol rolls, and a tihai that lands on sam for the tabla. Swing, a human feel, a count-in, tap tempo and export as audio or a General MIDI drum file are all included, and the beat runs on the audio clock so it never drifts.