Step sequencer and sampler
Synced loop
Load a loop, enter its original BPM, and it follows the drum machine's tempo.This is a free online drum machine built for playing guitar over. Press Rock, Funk or Reggae, press Play, and you have a beat in two clicks. From there it is a step sequencer: 8 tracks, a grid of sixteenth notes, and every step yours to switch on or off. No account, nothing to install. It sits alongside the rest of our free guitar tools.
How to make a beat in a minute
1. Start from a groove
Press Rock, Funk or Reggae. Each one fills the grid and sets its own tempo. Press Play, or the space bar, and listen before you change anything.
2. Set the tempo
Type a BPM between 50 and 200, or drag the slider. If you are working on a song, get its tempo first with the tap tempo.
3. Change the steps
Click a cell to add a hit, click it again to remove it. Take things out before you add: a beat with room in it leaves room for the guitar.
Play on the bar waits for the next bar line before it starts, which helps when a loop is already running. The bar along the top of the page stays in view as you scroll down the tracks, with Play, Stop, the tempo, the length, the swing and the three patterns in reach.
Three ready grooves
Each button clears the current pattern, writes its groove and sets its tempo. They are starting points, not presets to keep: change a step and the groove is yours.
| Groove | Tempo | What it plays |
|---|---|---|
| Rock | 100 BPM | Kick on beats 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4 doubled by a soft clap, closed hi-hat on every eighth note, and an open hat on the last sixteenth of the bar. |
| Funk | 96 BPM | Kick on 1, on the and of 2 and on the and of 3, snare on 2 and 4, eighth note hi-hats, and soft clap and rim hits on the sixteenth before each beat. |
| Reggae | 78 BPM | Kick on beat 3 only, snare and rim on 2 and 4, hi-hats on the offbeats, and a bell on 1 and 3. |
Four on the floor puts the first track on beats 1, 2, 3 and 4 and touches nothing else. Randomize lights up roughly one step in five across every track, at random velocities: rarely a groove on its own, often a good idea to clean up. Clear empties the current pattern.
Four kits, all synthesized
The sounds are built in the page rather than played from recordings, so the drum machine loads fast and works the same on any browser. The kit menu swaps all eight sounds at once and renames the tracks.
| Kit | The eight tracks |
|---|---|
| Electro | Deep kick, snare, closed and open hi-hat, clap, low tom, rim shot, cowbell |
| Acoustic roots | Bass drum, wood snare, closed and open hi-hat, soft clap, floor tom, wood rim shot, bell |
| Percussion | Surdo, caja, shaker, open shaker, palmas, low djembe, clave rim, agogo bell |
| Rap / 808 | 808 kick, dry snare, trap hat, trap open hat, rap clap, sub tom, trap rim, bell |
Want a real snare, a sampled loop or your own voice? Drop an audio file on a track and it plays that file instead. Load 8 samples fills all eight tracks in one go, in the alphabetical order of the file names.
The step sequencer
A step is a sixteenth note. A pattern is 8, 16 or 32 of them, which is half a bar, one bar or two bars of 4/4. Every lit step can be shaped without leaving the grid:
| On a step | What it does |
|---|---|
| Click | Turns the step on at medium velocity, or off if it was on. |
| Alt+click | Cycles a lit step through soft, medium and loud. |
| Shift+click | Ratchet: plays the step 1, 2, 3 or 4 times inside its sixteenth, for rolls and flams. |
| Ctrl+click | Probability: the step plays every time, or 75, 50 or 25% of the time, so the loop never repeats exactly. |
Each track also has its own controls: volume, pan, a filter, mute and solo, plus a pitch control over twelve half steps either way for a sample you load. Len gives the track a loop length of its own, so a three step figure can cycle against a sixteen step kick. Choke puts tracks in a group where a new hit cuts the one still ringing, the way a closed hi-hat cuts an open one.
Patterns A, B and C, chained into a song
The drum machine holds three patterns. Pick one with the A, B and C
buttons and program it; the other two keep their own steps. Then write a
chain in the Chain field: letters, with a number to repeat one. A3 B plays A three times, then B, then starts again. A2 B A2 C gives
you a verse that turns into a fill every fourth bar.
That is enough to practice a song form: a plain groove for the verse, a busier one for the chorus, and a fill pattern to mark where the change comes.
Drum machine or metronome?
Both keep time, and they train different things. The online metronome gives you a click with nothing around it, which is the honest test of your timing. A drum beat gives you a groove, which is closer to music and more fun to play over, and also easier to lean on.
| You want to | Use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Clean up your timing | Metronome | A plain click hides nothing. If you rush or drag, you hear it. |
| Play with some feel | Drum machine | A kick, a snare and hats give you a groove to lock into, closer to playing with a drummer. |
| Practice a whole song's chords | Backing track generator | Drums, bass and keys play your progression, so you hear where each change lands. |
| Build a part in layers | Online looper | Record your own guitar over a click and stack a second part on it. |
A good habit uses both: clean a part up on the click, then play it over a beat. If it falls apart on the beat, you were following the drums. If it falls apart on the click, the drums were carrying you.
A ten minute routine with a drum beat
- Two minutes: listen to the beat without playing. Count it out loud.
- Three minutes: play one chord per bar, on beat 1 only, in time with the kick.
- Three minutes: add a full strumming pattern. Our guitar strumming patterns are written out on the same eighth note grid, easiest first.
- Two minutes: mute the hi-hat track, then the snare. If you keep your place with only the kick left, the pulse is yours.
For chords, take a progression from our chord progressions page. If you want bass and keys playing those chords as well as drums, the backing track generator does that from the chords you type.
Save, export and record
- Export MIDI writes the whole chain as a .mid file. Each track lands on a General MIDI drum note (kick 36, snare 38, closed hat 42), so the beat opens on any drum instrument in your DAW.
- Record audio captures what you hear until you press Stop recording. It saves an MP3 when your browser can record one, otherwise the browser's own format.
- Save and Load write and read the whole project as a JSON file: patterns, chain, tempo, swing, kit and track settings.
- Synced loop plays an audio loop of your own along with the beat. Give it the loop's original BPM and it follows the drum machine's tempo, keeping its pitch.
To record your guitar on top of the beat instead, the online looper does that, with a count in and a metronome of its own. And if you would rather write a rhythm down than program it, the rhythm generator puts it on a staff and plays it back.
Frequently asked questions
Is this drum machine free?
Can I use my own drum samples?
Can I export the beat?
Which time signatures does it play?
How do I chain patterns into a song?
Why does the beat sound late against my guitar?
Who made this
Guitar Social Club is the work of Yohann Abbou, a guitar teacher in Paris. He teaches adults, which shapes everything here: people with jobs, limited practice time and a clear idea of the songs they want to play. A drum machine earns its place in that hour because a groove makes practice feel like music, and none of the tools asks you to sign up before it works. The rest of our free guitar tools work the same way.
More about Yohann on his page, and about why Guitar Social Club exists.