I built a small rule-based drum groove generator for myself (no AI, just musical rules and probabilities)
I’ve been messing around with drum programming for a while and got a bit tired of how most MIDI stuff works (either fully random or super rigid). So I started building a small tool for myself. It’s basically a rule-based drum generator — no AI or anything fancy, just a bunch of musical constraints and probabilities under the hood.
Each instrument behaves differently (kick/snare vs hats vs ride etc.), so instead of random hits it tries to keep a sense of structure while still generating variations. You can push things like density, syncopation, timing feel (push/drag), velocity ranges, bar similarity, fills… and it spits out a new groove every time.
I also added a grid + playback so I can tweak stuff before exporting MIDI.
Right now I’m mostly using it for pretty basic things:
- quickly trying out groove ideas I wouldn’t normally write
- getting variations with ghost notes
- sketching a rough drum demo at home without overthinking it
Still pretty early and definitely rough in some parts, but it’s already giving me patterns I wouldn’t normally write by hand.
If anyone’s curious, this is the current web version:
Curious if this sounds useful to anyone else or if I’m just overengineering my own workflow 😅