How to use the drum machine
- Press Play (or Space). The page opens with a boom bap groove so you hear something straight away.
- Edit the grid while it loops. Rows are drums, columns are sixteenth notes: steps 1, 5, 9 and 13 are the four beats of the bar, shaded in pairs. Tap a step to switch it on or off, or drag along a row to fill several. Tap a drum’s name to hear it; M mutes the row.
- Set the feel. Type a tempo or use − and +, or press Tap in time with a song. Move Swing right for a shuffle, and switch the kit between 808, 909 and acoustic sounds.
- Add dynamics. In Velocity mode each tap cycles a step through soft, normal and accent. Soft snares between the backbeats are ghost notes; accents on the hats give a groove its push.
- Keep it. The address bar always holds your beat, and Share result makes a link that opens it for anyone. Download a WAV loop of 1 to 16 bars, or a MIDI file for your DAW.
Reading the grid
One row is one bar of 4/4 split into 16 steps. Counted aloud, the steps are “1 e and a, 2 e and a, 3 e and a, 4 e and a”: step 1 is the downbeat, step 3 the “and” of beat 1, step 5 beat 2, and so on. Most popular styles are built from the same few placements:
- Backbeat: snare or clap on steps 5 and 13 (beats 2 and 4). Almost every rock, pop, funk and hip-hop beat has it.
- Four on the floor: kick on 1, 5, 9 and 13, the pulse of house, disco and techno, usually with an open hat on the off-beats (3, 7, 11, 15).
- Half time: a single snare or clap on step 9, which makes a fast tempo feel half as fast. Trap at 140 BPM feels like 70.
- Hi-hats: eighth notes (every odd step) are the default; sixteenths (every step) add energy, and a few extra hits in one beat make the “rolls” of trap.
The Groove menu loads nine starting points: rock, boom bap, house, trap, disco, funk, reggaeton (the dembow rhythm), bossa nova and electro, each at a typical tempo. Loading one keeps your track volumes.
The kits
Every sound is synthesized in your browser as the drum is hit, so nothing is downloaded and the WAV file matches what you hear. The 808 kit is modelled on the Roland TR-808 (1980): a deep, long, pitch-dropping kick, a tonal snare, and hats and cymbal built from six square-wave oscillators. The 909 kit follows the TR-909 (1983): a shorter, punchier kick with a click, a noisier snare, and hats with a little noise mixed in (the original’s hats were samples). The acoustic kit uses shorter envelopes and filtered noise for a drum-kit sound. As on the originals, a closed hat cuts off a ringing open hat.
Exporting
- WAV: an exact loop of the length you choose, rendered offline at 44.1 kHz, 16-bit stereo and levelled to −1 dBFS. Cymbals and open hats ring over the bar lines and the end wraps onto the start, as when the beat repeats, so the file loops without a gap or a click. At the pattern’s tempo it lines up with a DAW’s grid.
- MIDI: a General MIDI drum track on channel 10 at the pattern’s tempo, with velocity and swing kept. Kick is note 36, snare 38, clap 39, closed hat 42, open hat 46, toms 45 and 50, rimshot 37, cowbell 56 and crash 49, so any drum plug-in plays it with its own sounds.
To find the tempo of a song you want to program a beat for, use the BPM finder. To turn a hummed or played melody into MIDI to go with it, use audio to MIDI, and to check the pads of a MIDI controller, the MIDI tester.
Tips and troubleshooting
- No sound? Check the tab isn’t muted; on iPhone and iPad turn off Silent mode. Browsers only start audio after a click or key press, so press Play again if nothing happens.
- Timing stays steady even when the page is busy: each hit is scheduled ahead on the audio clock. With Bluetooth headphones the whole beat is delayed a little, which only matters when you play along.
- Tempo changes take effect from the next step, so you can speed up or slow down while it plays.