120 BPM
Drums
Bass
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4/4
Drag rhythmic values into up to 4 beat blocks per line to build a drum groove, or click a tile then click a block to place it — handy on a trackpad.
Taiko drumming's roots stretch back over a thousand years, from religious ritual and court music through its use in signaling and coordinating armies, to the festival (matsuri) drumming and ensemble performance style (kumi-daiko) that took its modern form in the mid-20th century and is now what most people picture. This groove mimics a basic "don-doko" festival pattern: a deep, resonant "don" on the big drum's downbeat (the kick here) answered by a rolling "doko-doko" figure across two smaller drums (the toms), with a rim "ka" accent (the rimshot) pushing back into the next downbeat.
Slot A is the core groove; switch to B, C, and D above for variations on it — a genuine stylistic twist, a busier or sparser take, and a fill or break, the same way a real performance of this rhythm would vary it. Press play to hear it, slow the tempo down to study it, or drag the beat blocks apart to see exactly how it's built.
It is free and needs no login. Nothing you change here is saved, so use it as a reference or as the starting point for a beat of your own — then open the RockBlocks drum machine to build from scratch.