Tool: Virtual Drumming
Virtual Drumming is another terrific tool for musicians, teachers, and students. It has some really great features and sounds, and does WAY more than just drumming. There is the main attraction - a gorgeous virtual drumset that has each drum mapped to a key on your QWERTY keyboard, a drum machine to create beats using the variety of drumsets that are available, drum lessons, a virtual piano, games, downloadable app, and more. The best part? You can do most things for FREE! All online - using any device. Definitely worth bookmarking this one!
The main menu of Virtual Drumming has a variety of options, including Drum Games, Custom Drums, Drum Machine, Drums App & Drum Lessons. If you click on Drum Games, you’ll see your first playable drumset. On the left, you’ll see an collapsed menu icon (also known as a hamburger). If you click on that, you’ll see drumset, keys and sounds. The drumset menu is shown above. Here you’ll be able to choose from a wide variety of drum setups that are based on famous drummers, as well as some original sets. If you click on John Bonham, you’ll switch to a virtual version of Bonhams famous drumset from Led Zeppelin.
This is a GREAT feature for students and musicians to explore the various setups for a variety of bands and styles. Next, you can click on the Keys button. Here you can select the various letters from the QWERTY keyboard and map them to each drum and cymbal in the set. This makes it possible for you to drum using your laptop keyboard. I haven’t tried connecting a pad controllers but it would be awesome if that was possible.
Lastly, you can select the Sounds button to control the volume and dynamic range of each drum and cymbal. Extremely cool functionality.
The Drum Sequencer allows you to make patterns using each setup using a basic step sequencer. You can save, download (this feature only works with the downloaded app version), and load your patterns. You can control the metronome, BPM, time signature, human dynamics and load preset patterns - all great functions. It is a very eay to use sequencer and you can create multi-measure beats very easily.
If you select Custom Drums from the main menu, you can then open up the Drum Store (everything is free) and select your own custom drums, select your colors and finishes, everything. You can then load those custom drumsets into your key map and play away! Incredibly cool for both beginner and advanced drummers.
I highly recommend bookmarking this site today and let your students check it out - especially your drummers. These students are often left out of the many tech tools that are better suited for melodic instruments, so make this one special just for them (although EVERY musician will probably find this one to be a LOT of fun). Enjoy!
