Have you (or your dog) ever wanted a drum machine? If so, this project is for you. We will use an Arduino Leonardo, a MPR121 capacitive touch shield, and a strip of sixteen RGB NeoPixels to make a simple drum machine that you can use to control USB MIDI or serial MIDI devices.

This tutorial is based on the same hardware setup used in the Make a Sequencer from a Tree video. The only difference is that the MPR121 capactive touch breakout was used in the video instead of the MPR121 shield we will be using in this tutorial, but they both will work equally well for this project. If you would like to learn more about how the metal buttons were created in that video, you can check out our guide on using metal inlay for capactive touch buttons.

Let's take a look at the version of that sequencer we will be making in this tutorial.

Now that you have a handle on what we are making, let's take a look at how to wire everything up.

This guide was first published on Apr 29, 2015. It was last updated on Apr 29, 2015.

This page (Overview) was last updated on Apr 24, 2015.

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