808 Drum Machine Online

It is a browser drum machine with six tracks: kick, snare, hi-hat, open hat, clap and a track labelled 808. The kick is a sine tone that drops quickly in pitch, the same basic recipe analogue drum machines used. The 808 track is a longer, lower sine note that rings for about half a second.

To be plain about what it is not: this is not an emulation of the original early-1980s hardware, it does not use recordings of it, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by its maker. The sounds are built in your browser from simple oscillators and filtered noise, in that general style.

The page opens on the Trap pattern at 140 BPM, the setting where 808 bass is most at home today. Four other presets, a 60 to 180 BPM tempo slider, Variation and Clear complete the controls. There is no tuning, decay or volume knob per sound. WAV downloads four bars of the pattern as an audio file, and Save link turns the grid into a link you can reopen.

The term comes from a drum machine released in the early 1980s whose bass drum was an analogue circuit, not a recording. Turned up to a long decay, that kick became a low, humming boom. Producers started treating it as a bass instrument, and "an 808" now means any deep, sustained sub-bass note of that kind.

An 808 is felt as much as heard. Its energy sits at the very bottom of the spectrum, so on phone speakers it almost vanishes while headphones or a subwoofer show its full weight. The note on this page starts near 58 Hz and bends down slightly as it fades.

The simplest rule is to layer them. Every kick gets an 808 on the same step: the kick supplies the click you hear, the 808 supplies the weight that follows. The Trap preset does this on steps 1 and 11.

Then let the bass talk. Add an 808 where there is no kick, late in the bar, as on step 15 in the preset, so it leads back to beat one. Leave room between notes: because each note rings on, two placed on neighbouring steps blur together. A bar with three or four well-spaced 808s usually hits harder than one with eight.

• Put an 808 under the first kick of the bar
• Match the other kicks, or leave some kicks dry
• Add one pickup note near the end of the bar
• Keep at least two empty steps between bass notes
• Check the result on headphones, not phone speakers

The name comes from the Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer, a hardware drum machine sold from 1980 to 1983. It made its sounds with analogue circuits instead of recordings of real drums, which is why its kick, snare, clap and cowbell sound like nothing else. It sold modestly when new and became a standard later, when producers found the units second-hand.

The sound most people mean by “an 808” is the kick: a low sine-like thump with a long tail that can be tuned and held like a bass note. In trap and drill that kick does two jobs at once, drum and bassline. The clap, the closed and open hats and the cowbell are the other sounds you will recognise.

• Kick: long, tuneable low boom, often used as the bass
• Snare and clap: short and bright, usually on beats 2 and 4
• Hats: closed for the steady pulse, open for accents
• Cowbell, toms and rimshot: the character sounds

An original unit is a collector’s item and priced like one. Roland and other makers sell modern hardware and software versions, and most music programs ship with 808 samples. If you want to learn the patterns before spending anything, a browser 808 like the one on this page is enough: sixteen steps, the classic voices, tempo and swing.

Whichever you use, the method is the same. Program the kick first, put the clap or snare on 2 and 4, add hats, then decide where the kick should ring long and where it should stop short.