Free Online Drum Machine & Beat Maker

Start with the kick on the first step of each beat, put the snare on beats two and four, and fill the gaps with hats. That is most popular music, and it will sound like a beat within a minute. From there, move one thing at a time and listen.

The presets are genre skeletons rather than finished songs — a starting point to pull apart. Load one, mute a track, move a kick a step later, and you will learn more about what makes a groove than any amount of reading.

BPM is beats per minute: how fast the music moves. Hip hop tends to sit around 85–95, house and most pop around 115–125, techno nearer 130, and drum & bass up at 170–175. None of these are rules.

If you can hum the tempo but not name it, tap the Tap button in time with yourself and the machine will work it out.

A perfectly even grid sounds like a machine, because it is one. Swing delays every second step slightly so notes fall in long-short pairs — the difference between a drum pattern and a groove. A little (10–20%) loosens a beat; a lot (50%+) turns it into a shuffle.

It moves the audio, not just the display. That sounds obvious, and it is the single most common thing to get wrong when building a sequencer: a swing that only shifts the lights looks perfect and grooves not at all.

Not every hit should be the same. Right-click or long-press any step to set it soft, medium or hard. Accenting the first hat of each beat and softening the rest is the oldest trick there is for making a programmed pattern breathe.

Velocity shows as the height of the bar as well as its shade, so the grid stays readable whatever your colour vision.

Four pattern slots, A to D. Build a main groove in A, a variation in B, then chain them — A A A B is most of popular music’s structure in four letters. Each entry in the chain has its own repeat count.

The Pads tab gives you eight large pads mapped to A S D F and J K L ; so you can play the kit with both hands. Turn Record on while the sequencer runs and your hits land on the grid, snapped to whichever resolution you choose.

WAV renders the audio exactly as you hear it, using the same synthesis as playback, so an export can never drift from the preview. MIDI gives you the notes rather than the sound, mapped to the standard General MIDI drum layout so any music software will read it correctly.

The .zbeat project file keeps everything — patterns, chain, per-track tuning, probability — for carrying on later. All three are produced on your device; nothing is sent anywhere.

Do I need to download any samples?

No, and there are none to download. Every drum is generated in your browser from oscillators and filtered noise — a kick is a sine wave whose pitch falls sharply while it fades, a hi-hat is noise through a high-pass filter. That is genuinely how these sounds are made, and it means the whole instrument loads in a moment and every drum can be retuned rather than being a fixed recording.

Why do I have to press Start before I hear anything?

Browsers refuse to play audio until you have interacted with the page — a rule that exists because of autoplaying adverts, and one every audio app has to work with. The first press creates the audio engine. On iPhones the same press is what stops the sound cutting out when you switch apps and come back.

What does swing do?

It delays every second step slightly, so pairs of notes fall long-short instead of evenly. That is what separates a shuffle or a groove from a machine-straight beat. At the maximum here the off-beat lands about a quarter of a step late, which is a firm shuffle without going all the way to a triplet feel. Crucially it moves the audio itself, not just the lights.

What BPM should I use?

BPM is beats per minute. As a rough guide: hip hop sits around 85–95, house and pop around 115–125, techno around 130, and drum & bass around 170–175. If you know the feel but not the number, tap the Tap button in time and it will work the tempo out for you.

How is the timing kept steady?

The sequencer never triggers a drum from a browser timer, because those drift and stall whenever the page is busy. Instead a coarse timer wakes about forty times a second, looks a tenth of a second into the future, and hands the audio clock exact timestamps. The timer only decides when to think; the audio clock decides when a drum sounds.

Can I export what I make?

Three ways. WAV renders the audio exactly as you hear it. MIDI gives you the notes to drop into any music software, using the standard General MIDI drum map. The project file keeps everything — patterns, chain, per-track tuning and probability — so you can carry on later. All three are made on your device.

What is probability on a step?

How often that step actually fires. A hi-hat at 60% plays roughly three times in five, so the pattern shifts under you instead of repeating exactly. It is under Advanced because it is the sort of thing that is delightful once you know what it is and baffling before then.

Is anything uploaded?

No. The whole instrument runs in your browser, your beat is saved on your own device, and exports are generated locally. There is no account and no server.

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