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How to make 808s hit harder

Turning an 808 up rarely makes it hit harder. These are the moves that do, in the order worth trying them.

The short version

Why 808s disappear

Most of an 808's energy sits in the sub, and phone and laptop speakers play very little of it. What they do play is the harmonics above it, and your ear fills in the missing fundamental from those.

So a clean, sine-like 808 can shake a car and vanish on a phone, while one with some grit reads as heavy on both. Most of "hit harder" is giving small speakers something to play.

Tune it first

An 808 is a pitched note. Out of key, it fights the chords and the kick, and the low end turns to mud whatever you put on the channel. Tune the sample to the root of the track and follow the bassline when the chords move. Check it with a tuner, not by ear on small speakers.

The kick and the 808

When both land at once their low ends collide: they reinforce on some notes and cancel on others, and the hit you wanted goes soft. Three ways out:

• a short, clicky kick that is gone before the 808 swells
• sidechain the 808 so it ducks a few dB under the kick
• drop the kick where they collide and let the 808's attack be the hit

Shape the envelope

Punch lives in the first few milliseconds. A soft fade-in blurs the start; a clean attack, or a short pitch drop at the top of the note, gives the ear something to lock onto.

At the other end, a tail that runs into the next note smears the groove. Set the decay so each note ends before the next one starts, unless the slide is the point.

Saturation adds what small speakers can play

This is the big one. Saturation generates harmonics above the sub, which is exactly the range a phone can reproduce. A little adds weight and presence. More pushes the 808 toward a growl.

Put it on the 808 channel itself rather than the master, so you control it per sound. If the sub thins out as you push, blend: run the saturation in parallel, or high-pass the driven copy and keep the clean sub underneath.

Soft clipping, and louder without clipping

The clipping everyone warns you about happens at the output: the signal goes over 0 dBFS, the peaks get chopped flat, and it crackles. Soft clipping rounds the loudest peaks off before they get there. That buys room to raise the 808's overall level, and it adds harmonics while it works.

How hard you drive the clipper decides the result more than any setting on it. Raise the gain going in until you hear the edge, then back off a touch.

Or put BEEFY on the 808: one big knob and a SOFT CLIP button. The demo on the page is 28 seconds.

Keep the low end mono

Stereo wideners and chorus on a sub cause trouble the moment the mix is summed to mono, as most club systems and plenty of small speakers do: parts of it cancel. Keep everything down low in mono. If you want a wider 808, widen only the driven upper layer.

Clear space underneath

A high-pass around 20–30 Hz removes rumble that eats headroom without adding anything you can hear. Then make room in whatever else lives in the low mids (keys, pads, guitars) so the 808's harmonics are not competing with them.

Judge it at the same loudness

Saturation and clipping make things louder, and louder sounds better for the first few seconds. Match the level of the processed and bypassed 808 before you decide. If it only hit harder because it got louder, the fader was the fix.

Stock plugins that do this

What BEEFY does

BEEFY is our saturation and loudness plugin, and it covers the harmonics and clipping steps above in one place.

BEEF is the main event: more weight, density and loudness as you turn it up. SOFT CLIP opens switched on. It adds harmonics above the low end so there is more to hear than sub, and takes care of the initial gain staging, so there is no input level to hunt for. JUICE sets the level going in, COOK moves the tone from rounder toward brighter and more bitten, and LIMIT keeps output peaks in check if you would rather have that.

Gazillion Industries LLC