When it comes to drumming you need three core qualities. One: A good sense of rhythm - obviously. Two: A high level of co-ordination - using both hands and feet simultaneously is ridiculously tricky to begin with. Three: A drummer must be insane - there's something about beating the hell out of skins all day that breeds mental instability and the desire to set fire to one's drum kit.

Of course, if all this sounds like way too much effort (not to mention the danger of burning your house down), then a drum machine is the obvious way to go.

iDrum is compatible with both the PC and Macintosh, and it can be used as a standalone program or it can be integrated with common music software such as Cubase, Cakewalk Sonar and Sony Acid. For the purposes of this review, we used the program by itself.

The main iDrum window is divided into tracks, each representing a different type of drum. The program comes with ten default kits, consisting of various drums and a number of default riffs for each (some of which are very funky indeed). These default patterns are easily modified, or you can create your own on a blank canvas, picking and selecting drums and dropping beats into the bar simply by clicking.

There are several clever bits here. Firstly, when browsing through drum samples iDrum plays a preview of the sound when it's clicked, which is useful. Moreover, when you click and place a drum beat in the music bar, different volume levels can be specified for the sound. Click near the bottom of the bar and the drum will be played with a light tap, whereas clicking at the top gives you a full-on whack. This makes it easy to add interesting nuances to your beats.

While iDrum doesn't boast a huge amount of drum samples, the sounds are produced to a high quality and there's a fair spread of different genres including rock, hip-hop and dance music. It's also possible to modify the program's samples, warping the pitch and decay and playing around with high and low pass filters to create some very different sounds of your own. Some experimentation can certainly be had here, of both the productive and entertaining variety.

Several other layers of customisation are present, with controls to change tempo and add swing type effects to a beat. Yet iDrum always remains easy to use on a fundamental level, save for the odd flaw in the interface, most notably navigation to the various samples within the program, which are spread rather awkwardly across several folders.

Users are also given the option to purchase extra samples from the iDrum sound portal: from a set of jazz drums to a recreation of the 808 drum machine, there's an extensive library here. Although you'll be forking out a fair bit of extra money for the privilege, naturally.

Verdict
Virtual percussionists will get a kick out of this simple but powerful program. While it doesn't come with a huge range of samples by default, the customisation options make up for this. There are occasional irregularities in the design of the interface, but otherwise this is a fine piece of musical coding.

Company: iZotope

Tags: drum machine cakewalk sonar macintosh drum beat sampling music percussion scratching