Finger drumming machine

For the last two years, I've been experimenting with dancing, but my whole life I struggled with a poor sense of rhythm. Or at least that's what my parents told me, and I believed them. Recently, I bought a cheap Chinese MIDI device, and it's so much fuuuun!

Since the beginning of this year, I've been taking online salsa classes with my girlfriend, and I decided that improving my sense of timing would take our fun to a whole new level.

Before that, I had a couple of attempts at learning rhythm with apps. I also bought a ukulele as a portable and easy-to-learn instrument, but my progress was very slow, all my neighbors could hear every note, so finally I gave up after a couple of lessons.

So I wanted to try something different. My friends who play in rock bands inspired me to check out percussion. I learned about electronic drum kits, but because I have many abandoned hobbies, I wanted to mess around with something cheap.

I found this video of finger drumming on MIDI pads, and I immediately fell in love. Especially because I can program this device to be any instrument or sample. I found this beast and decided to give it a try:

It's a $40 Chinese M-VAVE MIDI controller. Many people complained that the pads might be too insensitive for finger drumming. I had the same issue and had to press them much harder than I liked. I even thought about returning it. This is a known problem and some people hack it by adding a tape layer under the pads to improve sensitivity. I managed to change the sensitivity in MidiSuite and mashed the pads a bit, and now they are fine most of the time.

I cannot say much about the device itself, because I'm so excited to practice finger drumming that I haven't played around with all its options. A cool feature is the built-in battery and Bluetooth. The latency is negligible, and I'm quite confident I could use it, if not for the lag in my Bluetooth headphones.

This is my first MIDI device, and to make it work I followed Nifox instructions on how to configure the SMC PAD with Koala Sampler on my Android smartphone. I didn't even need to install MIDI Hub, but used the free version of MIDI BLE Connect instead.

The nice surprise for Linux nerds like me, there is also Koala Sampler for Linux. I haven't had any problems with it so far, and the best part is that it's free.

I've had this device for about a week and I practice daily with the Quest for Groove Beginner Course. Today was my first lesson with drum fills. I'm excited to share my practice and see how I improve over a year.