In your DAW

Funk Drummer in GarageBand

GarageBand for iPad hosts Funk Drummer as an Audio Unit, on its own track, following your song. Finding it the first time is the only awkward part.

Funk Drummer is not on GarageBand's own instrument shelf, and it never will be. It lives one card further along, behind the one marked EXTERNAL.

Getting it on a track

Tracks, then EXTERNAL

Add a new track and swipe the instrument picker along until you reach the card marked EXTERNAL. At the bottom of that card, choose Audio Unit Extensions. Funk Drummer is in that list as Lumbeat: Funk Drummer, next to Lumbeat: Funk Drummer (MIDI). Pick the first one if you want to hear the app's own kit.

It is worth writing that route down, because nothing in GarageBand points to it. The usual experience is scrolling through Drums, Keyboards, Guitar and the rest, not finding the app you just installed, and concluding that something went wrong with the purchase.

The same EXTERNAL card offers a second entry next to that one, Inter-App Audio, and Funk Drummer is not in it. That is the older way iOS apps passed audio to each other, and the app publishes nothing for it: version 5.00 ships two Audio Units and nothing else. So an empty-looking list there is not a broken install. It is the wrong list.

The EXTERNAL card in GarageBand's instrument picker on iPad, showing its two entries: Audio Unit Extensions and Inter-App Audio — The EXTERNAL card in GarageBand's instrument picker. Audio Unit Extensions, on the left, is the entry that has Funk Drummer in it.

Funk Drummer running as an Audio Unit inside GarageBand on iPad, with the host's bar ruler along the top — Loaded and playing inside GarageBand. The bar ruler along the top belongs to the host; everything under it is the app.

Once it is loaded

GarageBand keeps the clock

From there it behaves like any other Audio Unit. The tempo and the transport belong to the host: press play in GarageBand and the drummer plays, stop and it stops, and the song's tempo is the tempo it uses. There is no sync to set up and nothing to match by ear.

What you set inside the plugin window is part of the song. The groove, the kit, the mixer, the jam and intensity amounts and your Live Pads all travel inside the GarageBand project, so opening it again next month gives you back the drummer you left, not a default one.

If you add the plugin while the song is already rolling, it waits for the bar line instead of coming in halfway through a bar. Play shows off and nothing is heard until you start it, which is also the quiet moment to pick a rhythm and a kit without anyone hearing you decide.

Free to try, 7-day trial. Get Funk Drummer

The other one

When the groove should play something else

Lumbeat: Funk Drummer (MIDI), the second entry in that same list, generates exactly the same grooves but loads no samples and no effects at all. Instead of playing a kit, it sends the notes out, so the drumming can drive another sampler, a synth or a piece of hardware while costing a fraction of the CPU and the memory.

Everything else matches between the two: grooves, jam, intensity, swing, Live Pads, songs and fills behave the same, and so does the note mapping, so whatever receives the notes hears the drums you expect. The MIDI map lists which note is which, and how to change them.

Also worth knowing

Other hosts, same two plugins

This page is about GarageBand for iPad. The same two Audio Units load in Logic Pro, AUM, Cubasis, Drambo and the rest, and the routine is the ordinary one there: add the plugin to an instrument track and it follows the host.

Funk Drummer is also a complete app on its own, without a host in sight. What the plugin adds is the part that lives on a track.