Drum Lens

Yeah, I can play that.

Hear the drums on their own, follow the notation, and slow the song down while you learn it.

See how it works

Play the songs that made you want to play drums.

Drum Lens lets you practise offline on your computer, without a subscription.

  • Track separation

    Isolate the drums so you can hear what is actually being played, or mute them and play along.

  • Drum transcription

    Follow the drum notation while the song plays.

  • Tempo control

    Slow down the difficult parts, then bring them back up to speed.

The current DrumScribe prototype: song library, drum notation, and drums, music and click playback controls.

The current prototype.

View full screenshot

I had seven days to learn a festival set.

One week before a festival in upstate New York, a headliner band asked me to fill in. But I’m much more a dev than a professional musician. So on one hand I couldn’t say no, and on the other the songs I had to learn were way over my head.

To get started, I asked the drummers on Reddit how to survive a gig like that without making a complete fool of myself.

There was a lot of good advice: simplify the song, learn the structure, take notes. And a few people kept coming back to the same thing: get the parts written down and practise with them. Give my eyes something to follow as well as my ears.

I found a subscription service that did some of that for $118.80 a year, but I couldn’t use it offline on my laptop to take to rehearsals and the show without depending on an internet connection.

And also, I hate fucking subscriptions. They’re like paper cuts. Always there on your credit card, every time you check it.

Well, as I said, I write software, so I started building what I needed: Drum Lens.

Video coming soon.

Seven days later I played the festival. Not perfectly, but somehow I pulled it off. Grooving, on time and actually having fun.

Buy it once and it’s yours.

DrumLens runs locally on your computer. Track separation, transcription and playback work offline, so you can use it at home, in rehearsal or on stage.

There’s no subscription and you’ll never get locked out of your work.

$90. Once.

Old school.

Help me launch DrumLens.

The prototype works. Now it’s getting ready for other drummers. I’m making tweaks based on feedback, working on Mac compatibility and adding editing tools so you can fix the notes the transcription sometimes gets wrong.