Step Sequencer

Step Sequencer is a free online tool to create drum beats and melodies that play in a repeating loop. Click on the squares of the grid to switch the steps on and off, and the sequencer plays them one after the other, round and round, like a drum machine. Choose the tempo, the swing, the scale and the instrument, start from one of the ready made patterns, and download your loop as a WAV file.

How to use this online tool?

Press "Play" and the sequencer starts walking through the grid from left to right, one column at a time, playing every square that is switched on in that column. When it reaches the last column it jumps back to the first one and keeps going, so whatever you put in the grid turns into a loop. The column being played lights up while it plays.

Click on a square to switch it on or off, or click and drag to paint several squares in one go. Every change is heard on the next pass of the loop, so you can build a beat while it plays. With the sequencer stopped, switching a square on plays its sound, and clicking on the name of a row plays it too. The speaker icon next to each drum mutes that row without erasing it.

Not sure where to begin? Pick one of the patterns and change it, or let the "Random drums" and "Random melody" buttons make a first draft for you. When you like what you hear, click on "Download WAV" to save the loop as an audio file.

What is a step sequencer?

A step sequencer divides a bar of music into a fixed number of equal steps, and lets you decide, step by step, which sounds are played. It is how the classic drum machines of the 1980s were programmed, and it is still the quickest way to write a beat: there is no need to play in time or to read music, because the grid keeps the time for you.

Here each step is a sixteenth note, so four steps make one beat and sixteen steps make one bar of 4/4, the most common length of a loop. The step numbers above the grid mark the beginning of each beat, and the columns of every other beat are shaded, to make the rhythm easier to read. Use 8 steps for a half bar, 32 steps for two bars, and 12 or 24 steps for music in three, like a waltz.

Tempo and swing

The tempo is measured in beats per minute (BPM), from 40 up to 240. Hip hop usually sits between 80 and 100 BPM, pop and rock between 100 and 130, house around 124 and drum and bass around 170.

The swing delays every second step, the off-beats between one eighth note and the next, while the steps on the beat stay where they are. A little swing makes a beat feel relaxed and human instead of mechanical. At around 66% the off-beats land exactly on the triplet, which gives the "shuffle" of jazz and blues, and at 100% they sit halfway to the next step.

The drum sounds

The drum kit has no recorded samples: every hit is synthesized by your browser with oscillators, noise and filters, in the same way the analog drum machines made their sounds.

The melody

Below the drums there is a second grid for the melody, where every row is a note. Instead of showing all the keys of a piano, the grid only shows the notes of the scale you choose, starting from the root note in the octave you choose, for one or two octaves. That way every note you switch on fits with the others, and even random clicks tend to sound musical. Pentatonic scales, with only five notes, are the easiest to start with; choose chromatic to get every note.

Several squares in the same column play together as a chord. The rows of the root note are shown in bold, so you can find your way around the grid. The note length sets how long each note lasts: short values make separate, staccato notes, and values above 100% let each note keep ringing over the next steps, which is useful for pads and chords.

The patterns

The ready made patterns are starting points in different styles. Each one sets the tempo, the swing, the scale and the instrument together with the grid. Your volumes are kept.

• House (124 BPM): Four on the floor: the kick on every beat, the clap on two and four, the open hi-hat on the off-beats and a bass line in A minor.
• Rock (112 BPM): The backbeat of rock and pop: eighth notes on the hi-hat, the snare on two and four, and a riff on the E minor pentatonic scale.
• Hip hop (90 BPM): A laid back boom bap beat with swing, and bell chords going from D minor to G minor.
• Reggaeton (95 BPM): The dembow rhythm, with the snare falling just before and just after the beat, and a plucked arpeggio in G minor.
• Trap (140 BPM): Half time snare, a sparse kick and hi-hats that roll into sixteenth notes, over a deep bass in F minor.
• Chiptune (150 BPM): A fast arpeggio on a square wave in C major, with the bouncy drums of an old video game soundtrack.
• Waltz (140 BPM): Twelve steps make three beats: the bass on the first beat and a chord on the other two, the "oom-pah-pah" of a waltz in F major.
• Latin (105 BPM): A son clave on the cowbell, the toms answering each other and a major pentatonic melody over it.

Downloading your loop

The WAV file is not a recording of what you heard: your browser calculates the whole loop at once, offline, with the same instruments and the same timing as the preview. That is faster than real time, it is not affected by anything else happening on your computer, and the result is sample accurate.

Choose how many times the loop is repeated in the file, from 1 to 16. With "Seamless loop" switched on, the file lasts exactly that number of repetitions, and whatever would still be ringing after the end — the tail of an open hi-hat or of a long note — is mixed back into the beginning, just as it would sound if the loop kept playing. The file can then be looped in a video editor, a game engine or a digital audio workstation without a click or a gap. With it switched off, the last notes are allowed to ring out at the end of the file.

Can I use the loops in my own projects?

Yes. Every sound is synthesized from scratch in your browser, with no samples and no third party audio, so the loops you make are yours: use them in videos, games, podcasts and songs, commercial or not. Nothing you create here is uploaded anywhere.