Beat Studio – Drum Pads, Bass, Melody and a Whole Song

A Small Music Studio in Your Browser

Beat Studio works like the music apps producers use, cut down to the parts that matter. On the left are sixteen coloured drum pads: tap one and you hear it at once, and the screen above it draws the shape of the sound, its waveform. On the right is the step sequencer, a grid where each row is a sound and each square is a moment in the bar. Below them sit a note grid for the bass and melody, a row of song sections, and a mixer that balances everything. Start from one of the starter projects (hip hop, pop, trap or house) to hear how a finished track is put together, then change it bit by bit until it is yours.

For a gentler start with counting games and printable rhythm sheets, the simpler beat maker with counting challenges is the place to begin. Beat Studio is the next step up.

How a Beat Is Built

Almost all pop, hip hop and dance music is counted in bars of four beats. The step grid splits each bar into 16 steps, so each beat holds four steps and every step is a sixteenth of the bar. That makes the grid a fraction strip: a kick drum on steps 1, 5, 9 and 13 lands on every beat (four quarters), a hi-hat on every other step plays eighths, and a hi-hat on every step plays sixteenths. Switch the grid to 32 steps and the pattern becomes two bars long, which leaves room for a fill at the end of the second bar.

Steps between hits	Note	Fraction of a bar	Hits per bar
4	Crotchet (quarter note)	¼	4
2	Quaver (eighth note)	⅛	8
1	Semiquaver (sixteenth note)	1/16	16

A typical beat starts with three jobs. The kick gives the low thump, usually on beat 1 and somewhere in the middle of the bar. The snare or clap answers on beats 2 and 4, the backbeat that makes people nod their heads. The hi-hats keep time in between. Everything else, toms, shakers, cowbells and vocal chops, is decoration. Tap a lit step again to make it an accent: it plays louder and glows brighter, which is how drummers make a groove feel alive instead of mechanical.

Tempo, Swing and Tap Tempo

BPM means beats per minute. Hip hop often sits between 85 and 95 BPM, pop around 100 to 120, house around 120 to 128, and trap around 130 to 150 with the drums felt at half speed. At 120 BPM each beat lasts half a second, so each step lasts an eighth of a second; at 60 BPM everything is twice as long. If you have a song in your head, press Tap in time with it four or more times and the studio works out the tempo for you.

Swing pushes every second step a little later. At zero the steps are perfectly even, which suits house and pop; turn it up and the beat starts to bounce, the lazy feel of a lot of hip hop. Try the same pattern at 0, 20 and 40 percent swing and listen to how the mood changes while the notes stay the same.

Patterns and Songs

A pattern is one loop of drums, bass and melody. The studio keeps eight of them, numbered 1 to 8 across the top of the grid. A good habit is to make a pattern for each part of the song: a sparse one for the intro, a steady one for the verse, a fuller one for the chorus. Copy to duplicates the current pattern into another slot, so you can build a chorus from the verse instead of starting again.

The Song row turns patterns into a whole track. Add sections such as Intro, Verse, Chorus, Bridge and Outro, choose which pattern each one plays and for how many bars, and move them into order. Switch the top bar from Pattern to Song and Play runs through the sections from start to finish, lighting up each one as it plays. Most songs repeat their best ideas: verse, chorus, verse, chorus, a bridge for contrast, then a final chorus.

Bass and Melody in Any Key

The note grid shows two octaves for the bass and two for the melody. Choose a key and a scale and the grid only offers notes that belong to it, so every note fits with every other one. Major scales sound bright and happy; minor scales sound darker or more serious; the pentatonic scales leave out the two notes most likely to clash, so almost anything you tap sounds good. The highlighted rows are the root, the home note of the key: bass lines usually start and end there.

A simple recipe works well. Put the bass on the root on beat 1, move it to another note halfway through the bar, and line it up with the kick so the two hit together. Then write a melody of four to eight notes that steps up and down the scale, leaves some gaps, and repeats with a small change the second time. Change the key afterwards and every note moves to the nearest note of the new scale.

Mixing Basics

The mixer has a strip for every sound in use, plus bass and melody. The fader sets the volume and the meter beside it shows how loud the channel is playing right now. Pan places a sound to the left or right; hi-hats and shakers slightly off-centre make the beat feel wider, while the kick, snare and bass are usually kept in the middle. M mutes a channel and S solos it, so you can hear one sound on its own while you fix it.

The master strip shapes the whole mix. Low, Mid and High are tone controls: a little more low end makes the kick and bass fuller, a little more high end makes the hi-hats sparkle. Echo repeats sounds in time with the beat, and Reverb adds the sense of a room or a hall. A little of each goes a long way; if everything sounds washed out, turn them down. Keep the master meter out of the red at the top so the saved file does not distort.

Ideas to Try by Level

P3 and P4

• Make a beat with only a kick, a clap and a closed hi-hat. Can you make it sound like a march, then like a dance?
• Count the steps between hi-hat hits and name the note: 4 steps is a crotchet, 2 is a quaver, 1 is a semiquaver.
• Press Rec and Play, then tap the pads along with the beat to record your own drum part.

P5 and P6

• Build three patterns (intro, verse, chorus) and arrange them into a song of exactly 16 bars. How long does it last at 90 BPM?
• Write a bass line in A minor that uses only three different notes, then change the key to C major and compare the mood.
• Work out how many steps a song of 12 bars has, and check it against the number of times the Verse section lights up.

Teens

• Recreate the drum pattern of a favourite song by ear, then change one element at a time to make something new.
• Use the 32-step grid to add a fill at the end of every second bar, and a crash on the first beat of each chorus.
• Mix the track so the kick and bass do not fight: turn one down, pan the hats, and use solo to check each part.

Saving and Privacy

Every sound in Beat Studio is made from scratch on your device by the browser's audio engine, so there are no recordings to download and nothing is ever uploaded. Your project is kept on this device as you work, so it is still there when you come back; starting a new project or loading a starter replaces it. Save WAV makes a sound file of the current pattern (played twice) or, in Song mode, the whole song, ready to play in any music player.