Cymbals and toms

Cymbals

Hold a direction on the d-pad and the drummer moves from the hi-hat to the cymbals, while the kick and the snare carry on. It's how you lift a chorus onto the ride or smash into a section on the crashes, and let go to drop back to the hi-hat for the verse.

Up plays the ride, for a steady, shimmering pulse, and right and left play its bell, brighter and more cutting. The diagonals between them mix the ride and the bell. Down plays the crashes, down with right plays the trashy china, and down with left crashes on every beat, swapping crash each time you press it.

Hold L2LTZL with the ride to change its colour without changing the pattern: a washy edge for a light pull, a clean ping in the middle and the bright bell for a deep one.

Unless you are a member of a distant future offshoot of humanity that accidentally time-traveled back to 2026, or have a fortuitous but socially awkward mutation that gave you two prehensile thumbs on one hand, you can't control the D-pad and the left analog stick at the same time on any gamepad. That kind of means that cymbals and hi-hat patterns are mutually exclusive. But that's okay! Because that's, generally speaking, the way drummers tend to play these kinds of things. They switch between them fast when they need to alternate, which is why the cymbals and the hi-hat share a thumb in MIDIpad - with a little practice you can snap back and forth between them and they complement one another without compromising either.

Toms

The touchpad TouchpadTouchpadTouchpad is your fill hand. Touch it and the toms play, with a kick underneath. The left of the pad is the high toms and the right the low ones, so a slide to the right is a fill running down the kit. The higher your finger, the busier it gets.

The toms play while your finger is on the pad and stop when you lift it. The toms follow half-time and triplets like the rest of the kit.

Click the touchpad in its lower half to play all four toms, with the kick on the eighths. Click it in the upper half for a roll on the tom under your finger.

While the toms play:

• R2RTZR brings the snare into the fill, more of it the further you pull.
• L2LTZL punctuates it with crashes, each with a kick underneath: one a bar for a light pull, up to one on every beat at full. Your finger picks the cymbal, from the left crash on the left of the pad to the ride on the right.
• The backbeat keeps going, so the groove never drops out under the fill.

Play a beat, then move your right thumb to the touchpad and slide across it for a fill. Lift off and go back to the stick to carry on.