Beat maker

A drum machine that runs in the browser. Tap the grid to build a pattern across sixteen steps, then hit play. Every sound — kick, snare, clap, hats, toms, cowbell — is synthesised live with the Web Audio API, so there are no samples to download and nothing to install.

Tap a step to toggle it. Click an instrument's name to audition it. Space plays and stops. Your work is saved in this browser automatically; Download WAV renders the beat to an audio file, and Save pattern writes a small .json you can re-import or share.

How it works

Each row is a track; each of the sixteen columns is a sixteenth note, grouped into four beats of a bar. On play, a look-ahead scheduler reads the grid one column at a time against the Web Audio clock so the timing stays tight even when the browser is busy. Swing nudges every other step later for a shuffled feel; tempo sets the beats per minute.

The drums are made from oscillators and filtered noise shaped by short envelopes — a pitch-swept sine for the kick, band-passed noise plus a tone for the snare, high-passed noise for the hats, and a pair of detuned squares for the cowbell. Nothing is sampled.

Download WAV re-renders the same pattern offline — faster than real time, into an OfflineAudioContext — then encodes the result as a 16-bit stereo WAV. You get a standalone audio file (one, two or four bars of the loop) that drops straight into any DAW, player or project.