Shape 8 drum sounds from scratch and program 16-step loops. Works offline.
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Minimal Drum Machine is a small drum machine for making beats on your phone. It has 8 drum sounds that are generated inside the app, a 16-step sequencer, and a simple delay and reverb. It does one thing: make short drum loops.
What you can do
- Play
8 drum pads (kick, snare, closed hat, open hat, low tom, high tom, clap, percussion). A pad sounds the moment your finger touches it, and you can use several fingers at once. While a loop is playing, each pad lights up when it sounds.
- Shape each sound
Every pad has the same controls:
- Pitch: −24 to +24 semitones
- Decay: 20 ms to 3 s
- Tone: dark to bright
- Snap: soft to sharp attack
- Noise: from a pure tone to pure noise
- Delay and reverb amount for that pad
Nothing is a recording. The sounds are synthesized, so turning the controls changes the sound itself, not just its volume. You can reset one pad or all eight.
- Program a loop
8 tracks × 16 steps (16th notes, one bar). Tap a circle to turn a step on or off. Tempo is 60–200 BPM, and swing adds a shuffle to the off-beats. If you clear the pattern by mistake, you can bring it back until your next edit.
- Patterns A to D
Each groove has four bars and up to four patterns. Keep all four bars on A for a simple loop, or arrange them as A B A C for some variation. Tap a bar to edit it, tap it again to change its pattern, and long-press a bar to loop just that bar while you work on it.
- Delay and reverb
One delay and one reverb are shared by all pads. The delay follows the tempo (1/16, 1/8, dotted 1/8, 1/4) and has repeats and level. The reverb has size and level.
- Save and export
Save your kit, pattern, tempo and effects together, then load them again later. Export a groove as:
- WAV: the four bars as arranged, 44.1 kHz / 16-bit mono, made to loop without a gap
- MIDI: the four bars as arranged, on channel 10 with General MIDI drum notes, for use in other music software
You choose where the file is saved.
What it does not do
To keep it simple, some things are left out on purpose:
- No sample import and no recording
- Each pattern is 8 tracks × 16 steps and the arrangement is always four bars; there is no song mode
- Steps are on or off, with no per-step velocity
- Sound stops when the app goes to the background
- Timing and latency depend on your device and audio output
- No cloud backup: saved grooves are removed if you uninstall the app, so export anything you want to keep
Offline and private
The app works without an internet connection and does not request internet access. There is no account, and no analytics, ads or tracking. Your grooves are stored only on your phone, encrypted.
Design
Portrait layout with light and dark themes. The screens use icons and numbers instead of text where possible.
Support
All features are available without payment. If you would like to support development, there are three optional in-app items (Coffee, Lunch and Dinner-sized Support). They do not unlock anything.