What is Beat Maker?

Beat Maker is a step sequencer that lets you compose drum patterns and beats. Toggle steps on a grid for kick, snare, hi-hat, and other percussion, adjust tempo, and play your pattern in a loop.

Pick 8, 16, or 32 steps per bar across kick, snare, hi-hat, clap, and tom. Drums are synthesized live with Tone.js (no samples), so the engine starts instantly. Load a genre preset like Boom Bap, Trap, or Four on the Floor in one click, or swap the whole drum character with the kit selector. Tweak BPM from 40 to 240, dial in swing for a shuffle feel, mute or solo tracks, and right-click any step to accent or ghost it. When the groove feels right, bounce it to a 44.1 kHz WAV or a Standard MIDI File for your DAW.

How to use

1. Click on grid cells to activate steps for each drum sound (kick, snare, hi-hat)
2. Adjust the tempo with the BPM slider and press Play to hear your beat
3. Load a genre preset or hit Randomize for a starter, right-click steps to accent or soften them, then export your beat as WAV audio or a Standard MIDI File

When to use

• Sketching a drum pattern for a song without opening a full DAW.
• Practising drum-machine programming — testing four-on-the-floor, half-time, or syncopation patterns.
• Generating a quick beat loop to put under a podcast intro, lo-fi study mix, or short video.

Result

A bedroom producer builds a 16-step boom-bap pattern with a punchy kick on beats 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4, and syncopated hi-hats at 90 BPM.

FAQ

Where do the kick and snare sounds actually come from?

Everything is synthesized. The kick is a pitched membrane synth, the snare a noise burst with a short envelope, the hi-hat a metallic six-oscillator hit, the clap two layered noise envelopes, and the tom a slower membrane. No drum samples ship with the tool.

What does the swing slider change?

Swing shifts every second sixteenth-note later in time, giving the groove that loose, lopsided feel from boom-bap or shuffle. Zero is dead straight; around 0.4 lands near a classic hip-hop swing; past 0.6 it sounds almost triplet-y.

Why does the first hit sound a touch off after I press play?

The audio engine has to wake up the first time you trigger sound, and there is a small startup spike. After the first bar the timing is sample-accurate because Tone.js schedules notes on the Web Audio clock, not on setTimeout.

How is the exported WAV rendered?

The pattern is played back through an OfflineAudioContext at 44.1 kHz, faster than real time, then written as a stereo WAV. The export captures four bars looped at the chosen BPM and swing, ready to drop into a DAW. A separate MIDI export writes a Standard MIDI File on General MIDI drum channel 10 so you can rebuild the same groove with any DAW's sounds.

Can I program polyrhythms with this grid?

You can switch the grid between 8, 16, and 32 steps with the Steps pills. Sixteen handles classic 4/4, eight keeps things simple, and thirty-two opens up two-bar patterns or syncopation that doesn't repeat each bar. True polyrhythms like 3 against 4 still need a step count that isn't a multiple of two, but you can fake the feel by leaving deliberate gaps in the pattern.

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