This specification defines a MIDI-CI Profile for a default mapping of specific drums to specific Note Numbers. The note map used in this Profile was established by many products in the 1980s as a commonly used set of note assignments for drum sounds and that was later standardized in General MIDI.

Many drum machines, grooveboxes, keyboard workstations, portable keyboards, digital pianos, and software synthesizers (many of which do NOT support the full GM specification) have drum kits that utilize this drum kit mapping because of the vast quantity of MIDI data available that will play properly with these drum maps.