Online 808 drum machine

How to make a beat

1. Start from a preset or a blank grid. The pattern menu has starting points for trap, boom bap, house, electro and Miami bass. Clear wipes the grid.
2. Place hits. Each row is a sound and each column is a sixteenth note — four columns make one beat, sixteen make one bar of 4/4. The colored bands mark the four beats. Click once for a normal hit, twice for an accent, three times to clear.
3. Press play. Use the button or the space bar. You can keep editing while it plays; changes are heard on the next pass.
4. Set tempo and swing. Tempo runs from 40 to 240 BPM. Swing delays every second sixteenth: 50% is dead straight, around 58% gives a loose hip-hop feel, and 66% is a full triplet shuffle.
5. Tune the kick. The 808 kick is really a short bass note. Use Kick tuning to match it to your song’s key (the label shows the note) and Kick length to turn it from a tight punch into a long sub-bass boom.
6. Export or share. Export WAV renders four bars to a 44.1 kHz stereo file. Export MIDI writes the same four bars as General MIDI drum notes. Copy share link puts the whole pattern in the address, so anyone who opens the link hears your beat.

The sounds

None of the sounds are samples. Each one is built the way analog drum machines of the early 1980s built theirs — from oscillators, noise and envelopes — recreated with the Web Audio API:

• BD (kick): a sine wave that starts high and sweeps down to its resting pitch in a few hundredths of a second, with a long, tunable decay and a touch of saturation so it is audible on small speakers.
• SD (snare): two tuned tones for the drum body plus filtered noise for the wires.
• CP (clap): three quick bursts of band-passed noise followed by a short tail — the “several people clapping” trick.
• CH / OH (hi-hats): six detuned square waves pushed through high filters for a metallic tone. A closed hat cuts off a ringing open hat, as on the real thing.
• LT (tom), RS (rimshot), CB (cowbell): pitched sine and square tones with fast envelopes, including the famous two-tone cowbell.

Why the 808 sound is everywhere

The drum machine that gave this site its name was introduced in 1980. Because it used analog circuits rather than recordings of real drums, it sounded nothing like an acoustic kit, and at first that counted against it. Then producers discovered that its kick could be stretched into a deep, sustained bass tone, its hand clap cut through any mix, and its cowbell was impossible to ignore. Those sounds became the foundation of electro, Miami bass, early house and techno, and — decades later — trap, where a long, tuned 808 kick often doubles as the bass line. Today “808” is shorthand for that whole family of sounds, which is what this machine recreates.

Using the exports in your DAW

The WAV export is a four-bar loop at the current tempo, including swing, levels and kick settings. The decay of the last hits — a long 808 kick, an open hat — is wrapped around to the start of the file, so the loop repeats seamlessly instead of clicking or cutting off. Drop it on an audio track and it lines up with the bar. The MIDI export contains the same notes on channel 10 using the General MIDI drum map — kick on note 36 (shown as C1 or C2 depending on your DAW), snare 38, clap 39, closed hat 42, open hat 46, low tom 45, rimshot 37 and cowbell 56 — so any GM-compatible drum rack or sampler plays it with your own sounds. Accented steps are written at full velocity and normal steps a little softer.

Tips

• For trap hi-hats, set the tempo to 130–150 and fill the closed hat row with sixteenths, then remove a few and add accents to make the pattern breathe.
• For an 808 that works as a bass line, lengthen the kick to two seconds or more and tune it to the root note of your track. Use the BPM & key finder to get both from a reference song.
• Boom bap lives on swing. Try 56–60% at 88–95 BPM with the snare on beats two and four.
• Mute a sound quickly by pulling its level to zero in the mixer.

Limitations

This version has one bar of sixteen steps per pattern, one pattern at a time, and a fixed set of eight sounds. There is no per-step pitch or 808 glide yet, and the mixer levels are not stored in share links. Audio playback starts after your first click or tap because browsers block sound until you interact with a page. On some phones, the silent switch also mutes web audio.