Since Apple launched the App Store, there has been a deluge of apps that turn the iPhone and iPod Touch into musical instruments. In true electronic music style, drum machines were among the first instruments to appear and are still among the most popular. This post will show you how easy it is to create a rudimentary, sample-based drum trigger using the iPhone SDK.
Update: In hindsight, there are much more effective ways to accomplish this task. In the future, I’ll post a new tutorial dealing with on-demand sample playback using OpenAL for lower latency.
If you don’t have basic knowledge of the Objective-C programming language and the Xcode developer tools, you should take some time to familiarize yourself before you dig in. Apple Developer Connection is a great place to start. That said, you shouldn’t need much experience to follow along. At the time of writing, I have only been working with Objective-C and the iPhone SDK for about two months, so I am by no means an expert.
Download the sample code and let’s get started!
