You can be Keith Moon, John Bonham, and Phil Collins, all without a real drumset

Aerodrums is an air-drumming instrument. It runs on your computer and understands your drumming intent by watching you drum through a high speed camera. However, Aerodrums cannot be used to drum outdoors in daylight, so forget those Coachella dreams for a moment.

Aerodrums uses a subset of the Natural Drum Kit sample library, providing very high quality sound and expressiveness on par with a real drum kit.

For example, Aerodrums supports 16 different levels of openness for the hi-hats and uses as many as 58 different sound samples for a given openness level, per hand. Aerodrums uses different samples for the dominant and non-dominant hand.

You can point Aerodrums to your own sample collections to create new drums or cymbals to include in your drum kits. Aerodrums can also output MIDI notes as you drum, enabling you to trigger any MIDI compatible sampler (e.g. VST instruments such as Toontrack’s Superior Drummer), as well as record what you drum straight into a Digital Audio Workstation.

Here is a detailed list of the drums, cymbals and percussion that are sampled in the subset of the Natural Drum Kit library that Aerodrums uses:

  • Snares: Yamaha Peter Erskine Signature Model, 10 x 4 and Pearl Masters “All Maple”, 12 x 7.
  • Kick drums: Gretsch USA Maple, 20 x 16 and Gretsch USA Maple, 14 x 11 floor tom, positioned and played as a kick.
  • Hi-hats: UFIP 13″ “Bionic Series”
  • Splashes: UFIP 8″ and 12″ “Natural Series” splashes.
  • Crashes: UFIP 15″ and 18″ “Natural Series” crashes.
  • China: Zildjian 19″ “K Series”.
  • Ride: UFIP 20″ “Natural Series”.
  • Toms: Gretsch USA Maple 8″, 10″, 12″, 14″, 16″, one set of samples tuned for a bop sound and another set for a rock sound
  • Cowbell: Meinl 8” “Original Realplayer” steelbell
  • Tambourine