Make a Drum Machine

How can I make a drum machine without use my Arduino UNO as a MIDI device?
How can I manage the 8 pads I want to use?

Thanks for the attention !

Check this - http://www.instructables.com/id/Secret-Knock-Detecting-Door-Lock/ -

it is not a drum, but it gives you insight how to detect a beat.
You can use 8 pins for 8 sensors and use three PWM pins to control the output, might need an amplifier.

ryuk616:
How can I make a drum machine without use my Arduino UNO as a MIDI device?
How can I manage the 8 pads I want to use?

Thanks for the attention !

Do you want to actually synthesize the drum sounds, or just make a trigger pad to midi converter? One's relatively hard, the other's supposed to be quite easy.

Hi,
If you want to synthesis the drum sounds, I can probably help -

Its not going to be midi quality, but it is a fun quick to build project and with a little modding you can stop the main sequence and trigger the drums directly if you want.

Duane B

South England

I want to use flstudio(music software) with arduino...the pc must relieve arduino as a midi device...for example: I want to play a musical keyboard and the computer receives the notes with fl studio.
This is the video:

It's only that i have 8 pads instead of a musical keyboard

I hope you understand what i want to do

sorry for my english!

Well, for my project idea (which may or may not ever get built!!) I was thinking of two different approaches to accomplish the same thing - do an analog read on 8 pads and act accordingly.

As my project plan was for a modular system similar to the old Simmons kits, my first plan was for a master trigger module, and its job would be managing the input pads and MIDI/trigger signals to other stuff. This is how I imagined such a module MIGHT work (it also might very well NOT work, as I have had no time to build, code and test it):

Going by the highest midi timing resolution feasible on whatever micro I ended up using, first perform a sequential analog read on all inputs to determine which pads were hit in that "time slot" and how hard. Let's say for argument's sake that the 8 inputs could be polled sequentially every millisecond or so, and the 8 values obtained put in an array, which could be passed to another function responsible for generating the MIDI data.

My idea to test this if I ever got around to it would be to write a Processing app consisting simply of 8 coloured boxes which could change from green to red when a pad is triggered and display the velocity (0-127) in the box, and hope that if it LOOKED like it was responding correctly and quick enough, it would sound "in time".

I suppose with all the libraries available for midi/serial stuff, it wouldn't be too hard to take the pad data and assign it to MIDI notes... but then, this is all just pure speculation and untested by me.

I have attached a schematic from a project called "EDrum" which demonstrates how to hook up the pads to your micro's analog inputs. Perhaps you'll find it useful!