Rhythms & Sounds
Funk Drummer is more than a drum machine. The jamming tool improvises like a human drummer, creating musical rhythmic variations and breaks. Just move a slider to set the level and play music.
Seven banks
Every groove is playable at any tempo and reacts to the jam slider. Rhythm names below are a sample of each bank.
Funk, the rhythm-driven genre popular in the 1970s and early 1980s that linked soul to later African-American musical styles. Groove is the most important element of funk. This bank holds one-bar funk grooves.
Like much African-inspired music, funk typically consists of a complex groove with drums playing interlocking rhythms. This bank holds two-bar funk rhythms, where the phrase has room to answer itself.
Disco is dance music built from funk, soul and pop, characterized by a 16th-note division of the quarter notes established by the bass. This bank holds the dance-oriented side of funk.
Funk rhythms are usually binary, but there are ternary funk grooves with African or shuffle influence. This is where they live.
Jazz-funk, with a strong back beat, electrified sounds and the analog synthesizers of its era. Fusion funk rhythms tend to be syncopated, often very advanced and genuinely difficult to perform.
Rhythms with strong latin influence, where the clave and the funk backbeat share the same bar.
Fusion and jazz-funk players keep looking for new horizons, and odd-time measures open endless rhythmic possibilities. Fives, sevens and everything they suggest.
Version 5.00 adds dynamic custom user rhythm banks. Save what you play, name the bank after the session, the song or the gig, and organize your own rhythms exactly the way you play.
The sound
The factory library holds 35 multilayer sounds with 3 different hit types (ghost note, accented note and special) x 3 Round Robin alternating samples. The Round Robin alternating samples combine 3 layer samples of each stroke to create an extremely natural sound.
The point of all this is simple: a kit that sounds like somebody is playing it. A real drummer never hits a snare the same way twice, and the ear notices straight away when a machine does. Which is why 35 is not really 35: a snare here is not one recording but a ghost note, an accented note and a special hit, and each of those three rotates through three alternating takes, so one snare alone is nine different recordings. Count them across the library and it comes to more than 285 individual samples, and that is before any of the purchasable kits.
That is what keeps a repeated sixteenth from sounding like a photocopy: the same ghost note is never quite the same twice.
Ten drum kits combine those sounds: Natural, Woody Attack, Studio, Big Drums, High & Sub, Small Kit, Rider, Hooper, Old Greb and ElectroKit.
Six extra soundsets are available as in-app purchases, each a complete kit: LoFunk, Kompact, Damped, NuGreb, Session and Vintage.
Every bank and every sound is in the app. Download for Free
Guest drummers
The drummer button sits next to the jam pad, and it changes who is playing.
A bank of 30 rhythms of his own, his own kit of seven sounds (ride, hats, cross stick, snare, kick and two toms), and his own way of improvising: the jam variations and the fills come out different because the drummer behind them is different. A modern approach to funk drumming.
A bank of 40 rhythms, his own kit of seven sounds, and the phrasing of an older school of funk. Same app, same groove, another player behind it. His improvisation traces back to James Brown's legendary drummer.
Both are in-app purchases, and both are more than a sound pack: a drummer character reshapes the improvisation and the fills, not only what the kit sounds like. Their rhythms land in your library next to the factory banks.
Live Pads
The part of the app built for playing live rather than for programming.
Each pad holds a groove with its own jam and intensity amount, so the pads are not eight copies of the same beat with a volume change: they are eight sections of a song. Long press a pad to store what you are playing, and the pad editor opens right there to set its values.
Tap a pad while the app is playing and the change is queued, not immediate. The waiting pad blinks and fills with a countdown bar, new in v5.00, that shows exactly how long is left, and the switch lands on the bar line. That is what makes the grid usable as an arrangement tool instead of a panic button.
The dice fills the empty pads without touching the ones you built, and a whole grid saves as a Live Pad Set you can reload, share or send to another Lumbeat app.
Pads 1 to 8 answer to MIDI, so the switching can live on a foot controller while your hands are on an instrument. Three ways to address them, depending on your gear:
A whole set can be recalled by number over MIDI too. And because a pad change is both sent and understood as MIDI, one app can lead and the others follow: tap a pad in Funk Drummer and your percussion and your bass change section with it.
Song Mode
Intro, verse, chorus, bridge. Each part keeps its own rhythm, kit and jam level.
Bars per part, and where the fills land, so the transition arrives with the section and not two bars late.
Loop settings are remembered per song, so returning to a song tomorrow returns to the loop you left.
Export the song as audio or MIDI, now with the option to export effects included, or send it to another Lumbeat app.
Free to try, 7-day trial. Get Funk Drummer
Mix
Compressor and gate, equalizer, delay and reverb, combinable on the full kit. Version 5.00 adds a per-track reverb send, so the snare can sit in a room the kick never enters, and an Export Effects option so what you hear is what leaves the app.
There are also several random generators for when the blank page wins: shuffle a rhythm, a kit or a whole pattern and keep what sticks.
Download Funk Drummer free and try it for 7 days.
Free to try, 7-day trial. In-App full version.
More from Lumbeat
Funk Drummer now shares grooves, Live Pad Sets and Songs with these Lumbeat instruments.
