Drums Maker: Drum simulator

Review by eFreeware

The idea is straightforward: you get a set of percussion sounds on a touchscreen and you play them with your fingers. What makes it more than a toy is the editing layer, which lets you arrange the pieces yourself rather than accepting a fixed layout.

That freedom is the main reason to consider it. Most drum apps hand you a picture of a kit and you adapt to it. Here you drag cymbals and percussion into the positions that suit your hands, save the arrangement and come back to it later. For anyone who has tried to play a ride pattern on a screen where the ride sits awkwardly under the wrong finger, that is a meaningful difference.

Building a kit that fits your hands

The Edit Drums feature is where the app earns its name. You position every cymbal and percussion instrument by touching and dragging it, so the layout can match the way you actually play rather than the way a designer guessed you would. Once a kit is arranged the way you like, you can save it and reload it later, which means a setup built for one style of playing does not have to be rebuilt every session.

There are 42 percussion instruments to draw from. Rock, metal and jazz kits are included, each with snare, bass drum and four toms. Around those sit three hi-hat styles with open and closed sounds, four crash cymbals, three splashes, a ride with a bell, a china, tambourine, sidestick, two cowbells, timbales and congas. That is a wide enough palette that the customization has something to work with, and the developer describes the sounds as studio-quality wave audio at 44.1 kHz stereo.

Playing relies on multi-touch, so several fingers can strike at once, and the developer promises a quick response time. Recent work on the app has gone into improving the multi-touch logic, which suggests that responsiveness is treated as an ongoing concern rather than a settled one. The graphics come in both 2D and 3D styles, with animation effects on top.

Recording, exporting and playing along

Playing is only half of what the app does. You can record your drum tracks and play them back, then export the results as .WAVE audio. That export matters more than it might first appear: it turns the app from something you fiddle with into something that can feed a larger project, whether that is a song idea you are sketching or a part you want to hand to someone else. Recordings can also be shared to social media directly.

There is a built-in MP3 player for your own songs, so you can play along with music you already have, and 30 backing track loops if you would rather have something supplied. A simple metronome is included for keeping time, and an advanced sound volume mixer lets you balance individual pieces. Independent pitch controls for the drums go further, letting you tune the kit rather than just level it.

The combination of loops, a metronome, a mixer and pitch control points to something closer to a practice and production tool than a pure novelty. You can adjust how the kit sounds, play against a reference, capture the result and take the audio elsewhere.

Free to install, with ads and purchases

The app costs nothing to download and is supported by advertising, with in-app purchases also offered. I would treat the free download as the starting point and see how the app sits with you before deciding whether anything beyond it is worth paying for.

It is rated for Everyone and runs on phones and tablets, so the same download covers whichever screen you happen to have. The install base is substantial, over a million, and the average sits at 4.3 from 1,812 ratings. Those numbers are a reasonable signal that the app does what it sets out to do for a lot of people, though ratings never tell you whether a particular feature will click with you.

Who will get the most from it

The developer positions this for music production and professionals as well as beginners, for practice, learning or simply for fun. That is a broad net, and I think the honest split runs along how much you care about layout. If you have ever wanted a drum pad arrangement built around your own reach, the editing tools are the draw. If you just want to tap along to a song on the way to something else, the same tools will mostly sit unused.

Producers sketching ideas on a phone are a natural fit, because recording and exporting to .WAVE means the app can sit at the front of a workflow rather than the end of one. Drummers who want to work on timing against a metronome or a backing loop also have what they need here. Beginners get a forgiving surface to explore on, though the sheer number of instruments may take some sorting out before a kit feels like yours.

Tablet owners may get more from the customization than phone owners, simply because a larger screen gives the drag-and-drop layout more room to be useful. The app supports both, so this is a matter of how much space you have to spread a kit across, not a difference in what the app can do.

A flexible kit for phone-based drumming

Drums Maker is a free drum simulator that stands out for letting you arrange the kit yourself instead of playing someone else's idea of a drum set. The 42 instruments, three full kits, recording, .WAVE export, backing loops and pitch controls add up to more than a tap-along toy, and the fact that it has been updated as recently as June 2026 suggests the developer is still working on it.

The caveats are the usual ones for a free app: ads are present and there are in-app purchases. The app also leans on your willingness to spend time in the editor. If you never open Edit Drums, you are getting a competent drum pad with a good sound set and not much else.

For hobbyists, producers sketching percussion on a phone, and drummers who want a portable practice surface they can shape to their own hands, this is an easy install to justify. It costs nothing to try, the sound library is broad, and the recordings can leave the app in a usable format. That combination is what makes it worth the space on your device.

What's new in version 4.9

Multi-touch logic improved.