AmenBeats

AmenBeats is a real drum machine built for kids — with a full studio hiding behind a grown-up gate.

Kid Mode: One Screen, Big Buttons

No menus, no settings, nothing to break. Open it and the beat picker spins like a slot machine and lands on a groove, ready to play. Kids can:

• Pick from playful beats — Boom Bap, Rock, Disco, Marchin', Shuffle, Techno, Reggae, Waltz — and eight legendary breaks
• Tap the grid to add and remove drum hits, on a 4, 8, 12, or 16-step canvas
• Bash the four drums live — Open Hat, Closed Hat, Snare, Kick — right from the grid
• Flip power switches: SWING for groove, WILD to loosen it up, FILL! for a snare roll, DROP! to cut the beat out and slam it back
• Speed up and slow down with big plus and minus buttons
• Spin the wheel any time for a surprise beat

Save A Beat. Save The Whole Show.

Everything a kid plays is quietly recorded — the beat, the tempo changes, every live tap. One button saves the entire performance, however long it ran, and one tap plays it back exactly as it happened. Their beats and shows sit in their own list, ready to hear again.

Grown-Ups Set The Rules

Kid Setup tailors the app to each child:

• Choose exactly which beats and famous breaks they can reach
• Set the tempo range they can dial between
• Cap the volume
• Turn on mute and solo for older kids learning how a kit fits together
• Set up more than one child, each with their own beats, limits, and saved work

Kid Mode stays put. Leaving it takes a deliberate two-second press-and-hold that little fingers won't stumble into — so handing over the iPad doesn't mean handing over the studio.

The Grown-Up Studio

Behind the gate is a proper 16-step, 4-voice sequencer:

• Eight study templates of the most sampled breaks ever recorded: the Amen break, the Funky Drummer, Apache, Think, Impeach, When the Levee Breaks, Cold Sweat, and the Big Beat
• Tap any step through on, stomp (accent), and ghost — stomps add punch, ghost notes add the feel that makes a break breathe
• Tempo from 40 to 220 BPM, swing, and per-voice mute and solo
• Humanize and per-voice lay-back for a relaxed, human pocket
• Save your grooves and chain them into a looping song, each pattern held for as many bars as you like

Midi And Ableton, Set Up By A Grown-Up

The studio talks to real gear, and every bit of it is configured on the parent side — never in the child's reach:

• Send MIDI on GM channel 10 so your pattern drives a drum rack in Ableton Live or any DAW
• Export any pattern as a Standard MIDI clip and drag it straight into a session
• Import a .mid clip back onto the grid
• Sync tempo with Live and other Link-enabled apps over Ableton Link

Safe By Design

No account. No sign-in. No ads. No in-app purchases. No analytics, no tracking, and no servers — AmenBeats collects nothing, and everything a child makes stays on the device. Every drum sound is synthesized as the app runs, so nothing is ever downloaded and the app stays tiny. It plays through the speaker even with the ring switch set to silent.

Free.