Drums · free

Drums to MIDI, free. Eleven drums apart.

A drum loop you love on the wrong kit, a live take with a weak snare, a groove you want to edit hit by hit: all of them start with getting the hits out as MIDI.

TONIQ's Drums engine tells eleven parts of a kit apart and writes each on its own note, with how hard it was hit. Free, with no trial clock and no length limit.

Download TONIQ free What the free tier does
Drums to MIDI in TONIQ: a drum loop with ride, crash, hats, snare and kick on their own rows

Real drummers in, drum MIDI out.

Real drum recordings; the MIDI is unedited, played on a sampled kit. Cover art generated with Google Flow Music. Big room groove by DRUMHEAD62 (CC BY 3.0).

Funk

A funk groove with quiet strokes between the backbeats → kick, snare and hats, each hit at its own velocity.

Space plays and stops. Switching jumps back to where you pressed play; drag across the wave to loop one bar.0:00.0

Eleven drums, eleven notes.

Each part of the kit lands on its own General MIDI drum note, on channel 10, so a drum sampler plays it as it is.

A drum kit in a dark studio, each of its eleven parts tagged with its MIDI note
Illustration: AI-generated

  • Note 36

    Kick

  • Note 38

    Snare

    Soft ghost strokes too, at their own velocity.

  • Note 37

    Side stick

    The cross-stick click, apart from the snare.

  • Note 42

    Closed hat

  • Note 44

    Pedal hat

    The hat played with the foot.

  • Note 46

    Open hat

  • Note 48

    High tom

  • Note 45

    Mid tom

  • Note 43

    Floor tom

  • Note 51

    Ride

  • Note 49

    Crash

What you get.

Toms by pitch

TONIQ listens to how high each tom rings and puts high, mid and floor tom on their own notes, so a fill rolls down the kit the way it was played. A kit with two toms gets two.

The feel kept

The timing and how hard each hit was played go into the MIDI, so the groove survives the change of kit.

A whole kit, not one drum

Some tools replace one drum per track. TONIQ writes the whole kit from one stereo recording.

Free, and it stays free

Drum MIDI is part of the free tier: no trial clock, no length limit, no watermark, and the audio never leaves your computer.

Drums from a whole song

Choose Full mix and the drums come out as their own row and audio stem, next to the bass, chords and vocal; with Pro, as their own MIDI track too. In a mix the toms share one note.

Acoustic kits and drum machines

A live kit, a sampled loop or a drum machine pattern. A clean drum stem gives the cleanest MIDI.

From a drum recording to MIDI.

  1. 1

    Bring the drums in

    A loop or a drum stem as a WAV, MP3, AIFF or FLAC file, or the clip on a track. ARA 2 hosts read the clip; elsewhere, Capture records it.

  2. 2

    Choose Drums

    TONIQ suggests it when it hears a kit, and writes each drum on its own row.

  3. 3

    Drag the MIDI to your drums

    Onto a drum instrument track at your tempo: General MIDI notes, so most drum samplers play it as it is.

Setup for your DAW: ARA 2 or Capture. How accurate it is: measured on public test recordings.

Drums to MIDI: questions.

Can I convert a drum loop to MIDI for free? +
Yes. TONIQ's free tier writes drum MIDI from a loop or a full drum recording, eleven drums in all. No length limit, no trial clock, nothing uploaded.
Which drums does it write? +
Eleven: kick, snare, side stick, closed, pedal and open hi-hat, high, mid and floor tom, ride and crash, each on its own General MIDI note.
Does it tell the toms apart? +
Yes, in Drums: it reads how high each tom rings and writes high, mid and floor tom on notes 48, 45 and 43. From a full mix the toms come out on one note, 45.
Does it work on a full stereo kit, or one drum at a time? +
The whole kit from one recording. A clean drum stem works best; in a finished song, choose Full mix and the drums come out as their own part.
Does the MIDI keep the dynamics? +
Yes: how hard each hit was played goes into the MIDI velocity, along with the timing.
Which drum instrument should I play it on? +
TONIQ writes the kit as General MIDI drums on channel 10, so most drum samplers and DAW drum kits play it as it is. If yours uses a different note layout, remap it there.
Can I convert audio drums to MIDI in Logic, Ableton or FL Studio? +
Yes: put TONIQ on the drum track, press Capture and play it, or read the clip through ARA 2 in Pro Tools, Cubase, Studio One or REAPER. Then drag the drum MIDI onto your drum instrument.
Is this the same as drum replacement? +
It is the first half of it. Drum replacement triggers a sample on each hit; TONIQ gives you the hits as MIDI, so you can trigger any kit, edit hits, or quantise the groove in your DAW.

Also: Song to MIDI · Vocal to MIDI · MP3 to MIDI · Setup for your DAW