New to MIDI Guide: Drum maps

Let's take the guesswork out of drum machines

July 2, 2026

Image of a Roland TR-808 from an old magazine ad

Percussion-ish synths, like drum machines and samplers, use MIDI notes differently than a regular synth. If you send a C-1 to the MIDI channel assigned to your crash cymbal, do you really want it pitched down five octaves? If you have a drum machine with eight sounds, should you trigger it with eight unique notes, or eight unique MIDI channels, or both?

Setting the pitch of drum sounds over MIDI is useful. And some MIDI note information (e.g. velocity) has affects a drum machine's sound and yet cannot be represented as MIDI CC information. As with MIDI CCs, implementation of this is left entirely to manufacturers.

Luckily, those manufacturers document their drum maps just as well as my beloved MIDI CCs! That is to say, they are usually:

  • a scan, of a photocopy, of a fax, of the Japanese manual;
  • hidden throughout the 150-page manual, in prose, ELEKTRON;
  • part of the surviving Linear A corpus;
  • reverse engineered by powerful wizards, and preserved on Usenet.

This structured synth documentation feels in-scope for the MIDI Guide project, but it doesn't fit in the existing MIDI CCs CSV. They're two different data sets that can both describe the same device, and a device might have either of them, or both.

Because of that, I've decided to start documenting drum maps alongside MIDI CC implementations. For documented drum machines, you'll see a file called [device].triggers.csv (right next to [device].csv). And on the project website, when a device has a drum map, it gets displayed on the same page as its MIDI CC chart.

Here are some example drum maps:

The drum map format covers everything you need to know about sending a MIDI note to the device: the correct MIDI channel, note number (or range), and velocity to use, as well as configuration hints.

Like its sibling MIDI CC and NRPN data, the drum map data is offered under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license. That means you can use it in any project (for-profit or otherwise), without contacting us, as long as you attribute the data and license any derivative under the same terms.

I hope this of some use. If you have any feedback on the format, or a request for a device, please open an issue, or email me: midi@midi.guide.

–Ben

This dataset is provided under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International license.