Beat Studio

Make something before you read anything

The tool opens on a finished beat. You do not have to build one from scratch.

1. Press Play. Sound needs one click before a browser will allow it — that click counts.
2. Click a few empty squares in the Kick or Hat row. They fill in and you hear the change on the next pass.
3. Try a different starting point — Dusty · 68 or Boom Bap. Each one loads a pattern and a whole sound, not just a tempo.
4. Drag the Filter control in the Master section while it plays. That's the sound of the whole mix opening and closing.
5. Hit Download WAV. The file lands in your downloads folder.

That's the entire tool in five moves. Everything below is depth, not prerequisite.

Tempo, swing, and the controls toggle

Tempo

Sixty to two hundred beats per minute, adjustable one at a time with the − and + buttons, or hold either one down to run. The big orange number at the top of the page mirrors it.

Tempo is not cosmetic here. The echo is locked to it — change the tempo and the delay retimes itself so repeats stay in the pocket.

Swing

Swing delays every second sixteenth-note, which is the difference between a beat that marches and a beat that walks. At 0% everything sits exactly on the grid. Push it up and the off-beats fall late, giving that dragging, human triplet feel.

All the lofi presets arrive somewhere between 55% and 77%, which is high — that laid-back lurch is the genre. Straight house and techno sit at zero and should stay there.

Key and Scale

These set the key of the whole piece, which is why they sit up here with tempo rather than down in the bass section. Two things obey them:

• Changing the Key transposes the piece. Every bass note, the kick and the perc move together by the same interval — the groove keeps its shape and lands somewhere new, exactly as it would on any instrument.
• Changing the Scale changes the palette. Notes you've written are re-fitted to the nearest pitch in the new scale, and future drags can only land inside it.
• The kick and perc stay in tune. They're the two drums with a nameable pitch, so they follow every key change and preset. Hats, snare and clap are noise-built and stay put.
• The chords that fit are shown at the top. Beside the tempo you get two rows. The top row is one chord per note of the scale — the home chord in orange — and every one of them is safe over your loop. The second row is darker: real, common chords that sit one note outside the key. They're the ones that give a progression lift, and each carries a note the bass will never play, so use them as colour rather than home base. Blues shows the three dominant-7ths; Chromatic shows neither row, because nothing is off-limits.

You can still override the kick or perc by hand: drag their Tune control and your setting sticks until the next key change or preset. Hats, snare and clap are built from noise and are deliberately left alone — retuning them would change their character without making anything more in tune.

The default is A / Minor pent — minor pentatonic, five notes, the safest and most useful scale in popular music. Dorian is the jazzy one lofi leans on, Blues adds the flattened fifth, and Chromatic switches the lock off entirely and gives you all twelve notes.

Knobs or sliders

Every control in the tool can render either way, and the Controls toggle switches all of them at once without losing a single value. Sliders are the default: easier to read at a glance, easier to hit, and better with a screen reader. Knobs are there if you want the feel of hardware.

Sixteen steps, six drums

Each row is one drum. Each column is one sixteenth-note. One full row is one bar, looping.

Click any square to switch that hit on or off. Filled squares play; empty ones don't. The slightly heavier line every fourth column marks the beats — steps 1, 5, 9 and 13 are the four counts of the bar. If you want something that sounds like a normal backbeat, put the snare on 5 and 13.

The M button beside each row mutes it. Useful for hearing what one element is actually contributing — mute everything but the kick and bass and you'll hear whether your low end is working.

The six voices

None of these are recordings. Every sound is generated from scratch each time it plays, which is why the controls underneath genuinely reshape them rather than just making them louder or quieter.

• Kick — a sine wave whose pitch drops sharply at the start, plus a click of noise for attack.
• Snare — filtered noise for the rattle, with a short tuned body underneath.
• Clap — three noise bursts eleven milliseconds apart. That stagger is what makes a clap sound like hands rather than a snare.
• Hat and Open Hat — six detuned square waves pushed through a bright filter. Metallic by construction.
• Perc — two tuned square waves, useful for blips, rims and accents.

The one part that works differently

Drum steps are on or off. Bass steps also have a pitch — so they need two gestures.

Click to place, drag to tune

Click a bass step to turn a note on or off. The note name appears in the square.

Drag up or down on a step that's already on to change its pitch. Nothing happens for the first fourteen pixels of movement, so an unsteady hand never accidentally re-tunes a note you meant to switch off. After that, roughly every eighteen pixels moves you one note.

Turn a step off and back on and it returns at the pitch you left it. The tool remembers each step separately.

The drag is locked to the key

This is the setting that makes the difference between a bassline and a series of accidents. The Key and Scale pickers live at the top of the page, in the transport — see section 02 — because they govern the whole piece, not just this lane.

What it means down here: dragging a note can only land on pitches that belong to the chosen scale. You are not choosing from twelve semitones, you're choosing from the five or seven that actually fit. It becomes very hard to write something that clashes — and the kick and perc are retuned to the same key, so the bassline and the drums agree.

The Slide lane

The thin strip beneath the bass row marks which notes glide into place from the note before them instead of starting cleanly. This is the rubbery, sliding sound of an acid bassline, and the reason it works is that you use it sparingly — one or two per bar. Mark a step, and the Glide control sets how long the slide takes.

Four controls under every drum

Open Sound ▾ under any row.

Tune

The core pitch of the voice. Drop the kick's tune and it goes from a tight thud to a deep boom. Raise the snare's and it gets thinner and snappier. Hats measure in a different unit — think of it as brightness rather than a note.

Decay

How long the sound rings out. This is the single most character-changing control on the kit. A kick at 0.15s is a click; the same kick at 0.8s is a sustained tone that will fight your bassline. Short hats sound tight and modern; long ones sound washy and loose.

Level

Volume for that voice alone. Balance matters more than most people expect — pulling hats down to 35% and the snare up is most of what makes a mix sound "produced".

Chance

The probability that a marked step actually fires. At always, every hit plays every time. Bring the hats down to 70% and roughly three in ten disappear, differently on each pass — so the loop stops repeating itself exactly and starts breathing.

Use it sparingly and on the busy voices. Hats and perc respond beautifully. Kicks and snares usually shouldn't, because the listener is relying on them to know where the beat is.

Everything runs through here

Seven controls in three groups. These affect the whole mix at once, which makes them the fastest way to change how a beat feels.

Colour

Drive saturates the mix — a little adds warmth and glue, a lot adds grit. Past about 50% it stops being subtle.

Filter is a single control that does two jobs. Centre is open and untouched. Drag left and a low-pass closes down from the top, muffling the mix like a blanket over a speaker — this is the tape-and-vinyl move. Drag right and a high-pass strips the bottom out, which is thin and hollow and mostly useful as a transition effect. The readout tells you which mode you're in and where the cutoff sits.

Wow is tape warble. It very slightly wobbles the pitch of everything, on a slow drift with a faster flutter riding on top — exactly what a worn tape machine does. A little sounds warm and old. A lot sounds seasick. The lofi presets sit between 26% and 50%.

Space

Echo is a delay locked to your tempo, set to a dotted eighth so repeats fall between the beats instead of doubling them. Its repeats get darker as they fade, and the bass is filtered out of it so the low end stays tight no matter how much you use.

Room is reverb — a short space behind the sounds. Where echo gives you distinct repeats, reverb gives you depth and air. It's the difference between a snare that sounds stuck to the speaker and one that sounds like it happened somewhere. Also filtered so it doesn't muddy the bass.

Pump is sidechain compression. Every time the kick lands, the bass briefly ducks out of its way — like someone stepping aside in a doorway so both can get through. At low settings it just cleans up the low end. At high settings it becomes the audible breathing pulse of house and techno. Turn it to zero and you'll hear the kick and bass start to fight.

Output

Master is overall volume. If things sound crunchy in a bad way, pull this down before you go hunting elsewhere.

Getting the audio out

Choose a Length — 1, 2, 4 or 8 bars — and press Download WAV. You get a 16-bit stereo WAV at 44.1kHz, the same quality a CD uses, ready to drop into any editor or DAW.

The render happens on your own machine and takes a moment. It runs faster than real time, so an eight-bar loop doesn't take eight bars' worth of waiting. A short tail is included at the end so the last echo and reverb ring out naturally rather than being cut off.

Nothing is uploaded anywhere. There is no server involved at any point.

Everything you hear is captured — swing, chance, wow, reverb, the sidechain pump, all of it. What you hear is what lands in the file.

Getting somewhere specific

Starting points, not rules. Load the named preset, then reach for these.

Reference

Transport

Per drum voice

Bass

Master

Shortcuts

Common snags

No sound at all

Browsers keep pages silent until you interact with them. Press Play once — that unlocks it. If it's still silent, check the Master control isn't at zero and that the row you're expecting isn't muted.

It sounds different every time I play it

A voice has Chance set below always. That's the feature working. Set it back to always for a fixed pattern.

My download is silent or very quiet

Check that the pattern actually has steps switched on, and that Master isn't near zero. If you cleared the grid, there's nothing to render.

The bass sounds wrong against the drums

Raise Pump. The kick and bass are almost certainly colliding in the same frequency range. If notes sound sour against each other, check Scale isn't set to Chromatic, and remember that a hand-dragged kick Tune stays where you put it — change the key once and it re-seats itself in tune.

I lost my beat

Nothing is saved. Reloading the page, or clicking a preset, replaces what's there. Download the WAV before you leave — that's your only copy.

It looks cramped on my phone

Turn the phone sideways, or use A− at the top to shrink the text and fit more on screen.