Drum Patterns Guide: Free Online Drum Machine

Crayonbrain's Drums view is a step sequencer: each row is a sound (kick, snare, hat, 808, and more), and each column is one step in time. Click cells to turn hits on or off, press play, and hear your pattern loop. This guide walks through common patterns you can build.

Open Compose, switch the sequencer toggle to Drums, and use the drum drawer to add or remove rows. For playback, saving, and export, see the Compose guide.

The simplest usable drum pattern to start with is a backbeat: snare (or clap) on beats 2 and 4 of each bar, with kick placements you choose around that anchor. On a 16-step bar, a beat is every 4 steps.

Four-on-the-floor means a kick on every quarter note, all four beats of the bar. It powers house, techno, appears in many other genres as well.

Recipe

• Kick: use on every beat.
• Closed hat: use on ever off beat.

Hip-hop favors offsetting kicks, leaving space between hits.

• BPM: 85–95 or 70–80 for a looser, jazz-influenced rhythm.
• Kick: syncopated boom before the snare lands
• Snare: same backbeat anchor as backbeat.
• Hats: sparse — steps 3, 7, 11, 15 or only on the “and” of each beat.

Breakbeats chop the kick around the bar, more experimental and featured heavily in drum & bass, jungle and sometimes hip hop and techno. kicks land on unexpected sixteenths while the snare still anchors the backbeat.

• BPM: 85-100 for hip-hop-style breaks, 160-180 for drum & bass
• Kick: irregular spacing
• Snare: anchors the backbeat
• Hats: bridge the gaps created by the irregular spacing

Lo-fi beats stay sparse, short patterns and low hat density.

• BPM: 70-90
• Kick: First beat only, or every other beat for a gentle pulse
• Snare: Backbeat, or one per bar
• Hats: sparse, or skip hats entirely until you add chords.