A tidy, modern drumkit system for my iPad.
A really excellent and refreshingly reliable AUv3 drum ‘machine’, I have had a spate of other devs’ Audio Units crashing/locking my beloved GarageBand on my iPad Pro M1, and am glad this one is up to Ryo Togawa’s usual high standard. Looking at the built-in User Guide - it exists! - in either standalone OR Audio Unit instance, I can see there’s the ability to program drums if you want to set up sequences. I don’t, I mainly want to tap the drums in real-time and use the GarageBand iPadOS feature of ‘adding-on’ a layer at a time, to the MIDI blocks. IE I run GB, hit ‘record’ and do the bass drum, then repeat and as long as the track setting in GB is NOT set to do fresh takes, the next layer of MIDI ‘notes’ will be maybe the Snare Drum, or whatever. This is totally standard as many iOS/iPadOS music enthusiasts know. Don’t need to do this, if you are fast-fingered, you can skip along the twin rows of drum pad rectangles and drop the whole lot in ! (two kits can be shown at a time, one has a few more pads than the other I think). This avoids a lot of issues with some drum apps that are AUv3, where ‘recording’ either puts very little MIDI down, hiding everything, OR the drum machine app itself, insists on running while you also press ‘play’ in the DAW. I thought Audio Units, would understand/be connected enough with the host DAW, to realise that a recorded track, means you don’t also want the drum machine playing over it. I cannot usually find a tidy way to stop this happening, and so I have taken to manually dropping the drum hits in - hence I purchased this app, because it permits both modes. NOTE - I have not yet explored the ‘programmed mode’ on this as an audio unit instance, I will get to that sometime, but this dev is generally creating solid Audio Units that work, so I do not anticipate anything negative there, that wouldn’t be sorted. Obviously then my use case, is presently a straightforward one. It is really good that Ryo Togawa so clearly enables ‘manual’ drum hits as an easy way to get a drum track laid down. I selected a kit, then I tap the pad/rectangles, and stuff sounds off! Then I hit ‘record’ on GarageBand in a song, and it does what I expect. It’s surprising how hard some drum apps make this mode to do. When I press play after recording, there’s no doubling issues this way, nice and easy. So I did not have to learn how to program the drums, in order to hear them play in Apple’s baby DAW and easily lay down a drum track or tr
