Free online tool
Beat Maker: Online Drum Machine with 808 Sounds
Beat maker and online drum machine: a 16-step sequencer with 808-style and acoustic-style synth kits, swing, preset grooves, share links and WAV export.
Click a step once for a normal hit, twice for an accent (louder), a third time to clear it. Shift-click toggles an accent directly. Space starts and stops.
About the Beat Maker
This beat maker is a free online drum machine: you build a beat in your web browser with no sign-up. It is a step sequencer: you switch on steps in an 8-row grid, press Play, and the sounds repeat as a loop. The drum sounds are synthesised live with Web Audio, so there are no samples or recordings, and nothing you enter is uploaded. You can pick an 808-style or Acoustic-style kit, set tempo and swing, start from one of eight preset grooves, then export a WAV loop, print the pattern, or copy a link to your pattern.
How to use the Drum Machine
- Choose a kit: 808-style or Acoustic-style. The kit stays when you load a preset.
- Open the “Choose a groove…” drop-down to load a starting pattern, or press Clear to empty the grid. Loading a preset replaces the grid, tempo, swing, length and volumes.
- Set the tempo with the BPM number box or slider (40 to 240).
- Set swing from 0 to 60 %.
- Pick a pattern length: 16 steps, 32 steps, or 12 steps for triplets.
- Click a step once to turn it on, click again for an accent, and click a third time to turn it off. Shift-click sets an accent directly.
- Press a row-name button to hear that sound. Use the M button to mute a row, and the small slider to set its volume from 0 to 10.
- Press Play. Press it again, or press Space, to stop. Sound starts only after your first click or key press.
- Choose 1, 2 or 4 loops, then press Download WAV.
Space toggles Play unless the focus is in a text field, drop-down or button. Copy link copies the page address with your whole pattern in it. Print pattern creates a clean sheet with the grid and a title line, with the controls hidden. The address bar is updated after every edit as well.
How do you make a beat online?#
A beat is a repeating pattern of hits on a grid of equal steps. In this tool, each column is one step, and each row is one sound: kick, snare, clap, closed hat, open hat, low tom, high tom, and rim or cowbell. Turning on a cell means that sound plays on that step. With the default 16 steps, the grid covers one bar of 16th notes, with four steps per beat.
Tempo sets how fast those steps run. At 100 BPM, a beat is 0.6 seconds, so each 16th step is 0.15 seconds. Because the loop repeats, you can build a pattern one row at a time, listen, and adjust. The 12-step option works differently: it gives one 4/4 bar of triplet eighths, three per beat, which suits shuffle and 6/8-style feels.
What is an 808 drum machine?#
The name refers to the Roland TR-808, a classic drum machine. Its sounds were built from oscillators and noise, which gave kick, snare, hi-hat and cowbell a distinct character. The 808-style kit in this tool follows that approach: every sound is synthesised in the browser. These are synthesis settings only. The page does not claim to copy any hardware, and the kit name describes a style.
What does swing do on a drum machine?#
Swing delays the off-beat steps so that pairs of notes no longer sound evenly spaced. In this tool, every odd step (the 2nd, 4th and so on, up to the 16th of each bar) is pushed later by the swing percentage of one step. Even steps never move. At 120 BPM, one step is 125 ms. With swing at 0, the off-16th plays at 125 ms. At 33, it lands near a triplet feel, with the pair split about 2:1. At 50, the off-16th moves to 187.5 ms, so the pair splits 3:1. Swing 60 is the maximum. Preset grooves such as hip-hop use a swing of 20 for a looser feel.