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How to make drill 808s

Gazillion Industries · September 13, 2026 · updated October 28, 2026

UK producers built drill's sliding, menacing 808 lines, and in 2019 one of them, 808Melo, sent that sound across the Atlantic on Pop Smoke's "Welcome to the Party." Brooklyn took it and never gave it back. The 808 is the part everybody tries to copy first, and it's the part most people get wrong.

To make drill 808s, program a sliding bassline around 140 BPM with a half-time feel, use glide (portamento) so notes bend into each other, keep the 808 in key and playing one note at a time, and distort it so it snarls on small speakers. Then give it room from the kick with timing or sidechain, and keep it in mono. The slides and the distortion are the sound; the pattern just carries them.

The short version

The grid, in milliseconds

Do the division once and the feel stops being a mystery. At 140 BPM a beat lasts 428.57 ms, a bar 1,714.29 ms, an eighth 214.29 ms, a sixteenth 107.14 ms and a thirty-second 53.57 ms. Sixteenth triplets, the grid drill hat rolls sit on, land at 71.43 ms. Every glide, duck and decay in this article is measured against that sixteenth.

Half-time is the other half of the arithmetic, and it explains the swagger. Put the snare on beat three alone and the backbeat arrives every 1,714.29 ms, which is exactly the backbeat of a 70 BPM record. The hats keep running at 107.14 ms. A 70 BPM body under 140 BPM detail is why the groove drags and hurries at the same time, and the 808 is the one part asked to answer both clocks.

What makes a drill 808

Movement. Where many trap 808s hold a note, drill 808s slide constantly: short notes that bend up or down into the next, off the grid, often answering the vocal. Under a half-time groove with the snare on the third beat and restless hats, the 808 becomes the melody's shadow and the drums' second kick at once. The tone is usually distorted enough to growl on a phone.

Register is the other half of it. Drill lines live between roughly C1 at 32.70 Hz and C2 at 65.41 Hz and move inside that octave rather than above it, which is a narrow room to write a melody in: the widest gap between two neighboring semitones down there is 3.67 Hz, from B1 to C2. Hold those notes still and you have a bass part. Bend them and you have the hook.

Set up the glide

Glide, or portamento, makes a note bend smoothly into the next instead of jumping. In FL Studio, slide notes in the piano roll do it; in Ableton, Simpler's Glide control does it; most samplers and synths have a glide or portamento time. Set the 808 instrument to mono or legato so overlapping notes slide rather than stack, and pick a glide time short enough that the pitch arrives before the next hit.

How long the glide should be

Set it against the shortest note in the line, never by ear on a long one. A glide eats the front of the note, and what is left over is the only part where the pitch sits still. At 140 BPM a sixteenth lasts 107.14 ms. One cycle of an E1 808 lasts 24.27 ms, which is one divided by 41.20 Hz. Subtract the glide from the note and count what remains.

Under two cycles is barely a note. A 60 ms glide on a sixteenth gives you a swoop with a full stop on the end of it, and the melody you wrote never actually sounds. Twenty to forty milliseconds holds a sixteenth line together at this tempo. Eighths are a different budget: 214.29 ms means 60 ms of glide still leaves 6.36 cycles, so long glides belong on long notes and nowhere else.

Going the other way costs you a tick. Pull glide to zero and the pitch jumps between one sample and the next, which is a step in the waveform, and a step in a waveform is a click whatever caused it. A couple of milliseconds is enough to keep it smooth without anyone hearing a bend.

Constant time or constant rate

Two glide designs exist and they behave differently on a line with mixed intervals. Constant time takes the same milliseconds whatever the distance; constant rate takes the same milliseconds per octave, so wide jumps take longer. Which one you have decides how you write.

Work the numbers. A 40 ms constant-time glide across two semitones moves at 50 semitones per second. The same 40 ms across an octave moves at 300 semitones per second, six times faster, and the wide slide is the one that needed more room rather than less. So on a constant-time instrument, put your octave drops on longer notes. A constant-rate instrument has the opposite habit and will leave a wide slide still climbing when the next note fires.

Find out which one you have in ten seconds. Play a two-semitone slide and a twelve-semitone slide back to back at one setting. If they take the same time, the glide is constant time.

Write the slides

Start from the song's root. Let most slides land on notes from the chord, and use bigger bends as punctuation, not on every note. Overlap the end of one note with the start of the next so the glide triggers. Keep notes short; long drill 808s turn into a hum. And never let two 808 notes sound at once: two low notes through distortion make harsh extra tones that nothing fixes.

Where the slides land

Choose the target note before you choose the gesture. In a minor key the destinations that hold up under distortion are the root, the fifth and the minor third, because the rest of the beat is already built out of them and the harmonics the distortion adds will agree with the ones already in the room. Land on the second or the flat sixth and you get tension, which is worth having once in a phrase and tiring twice.

Size is a separate decision from destination. One and two semitones read as inflection, the 808 muttering back at the vocal. A fifth or an octave reads as an event, and events stop being events when you spend them every bar. A line where every note bends contains no bends at all, the same way a mix where everything is loud contains nothing loud.

Tune it

An 808 sample has a pitch, and a drill line moves it constantly, so a mistuned sample is wrong on every note. Check the sample's pitch with a tuner, set its root note in the sampler so the piano roll tells the truth, then write the line.

How far out of tune you can hear

Down here mistuning shows up as a wobble before it shows up as a wrong note, and the wobble has a rate you can calculate. Two tones a few cents apart beat at the difference between their frequencies. E1 is 41.20 Hz; twenty cents sharp puts it at 41.68 Hz, a difference of 0.48 Hz, which is one beat every 2.09 seconds.

A bar at 140 BPM lasts 1.71 seconds, so a twenty-cent error gives you roughly one slow pulse per bar against a held chord. Engineers hear that as the bass breathing and fix it by turning the bass down, which fixes nothing. An octave higher the same error beats twice as fast: twenty cents at E2 is 0.96 Hz, near enough one pulse a second. The error is constant in cents and doubles in hertz every octave, which is why a line can be in tune with the tuner and still fight the keys at the top of a slide.

Why the lowest notes read as thumps

Count the cycles inside the note and the problem appears before you hear it. A sixteenth at 140 BPM lasts 107.14 ms. Divide that by the period of the note and you learn how much waveform is actually in there.

Three and a half cycles is mostly attack and decay with very little steady middle for a pitch to live in, and that is before a glide takes a bite out of the front. On thirty-seconds it gets worse: 53.57 ms at C1 is 1.75 cycles, less than two complete trips around the waveform.

Three ways out, in the order worth trying. Write the low notes long and let the high ones be short. Move the whole line up a third or a fourth and let harmonics carry the depth. Or distort it, which puts content on the ladder above the fundamental where the cycles are shorter and there are far more of them inside the same window — the twelfth harmonic of C1 sits at 392.44 Hz and completes 42 cycles in that 107.14 ms. The third one is the drill answer, and it is the next section.

A slide down makes the note longer

A sampler that transposes by playback speed changes the length of the sample along with its pitch, and drill slides travel a long way. Play a sample seven semitones down and it runs at 0.6674 times speed, which makes it 1.4983 times longer. A 500 ms 808 becomes 749 ms. At 140 BPM that is the difference between 4.67 sixteenths and 6.99 — the note you wrote as five sixteenths now runs seven, straight into the next chord.

Upward slides do the reverse and choke the tail: five semitones up runs at 1.3348 and the same 500 ms sample lands at 375 ms. Two fixes. Cut every note to length in the piano roll and let the sampler's release end it, which puts the decay under your control instead of the pitch's. Or use an amplitude envelope with a fixed decay time so the tail lasts the same milliseconds at every note. Either beats discovering it on the low note at the end of the phrase.

BEEFY can take a clean bass note toward a growl. The demo on the page is 28 seconds.

Distort it without losing the floor

1. Duplicate the 808 or send it to a return.
2. High-pass the copy around 100 Hz.
3. Drive a distortion or soft clipper on the copy until it snarls.
4. Low-pass any fizz above it.
5. Blend the copy under the clean 808 and check on a phone.

If slides get messy through the distortion, pull the drive back or automate the blend down through the bend. The full method is in how to distort an 808.

Why a slide changes how hard it growls

The high-pass in that split stays put and your note does not, so the amount of signal reaching the distortion changes as the line moves. Count octaves against the cutoff. C1 at 32.70 Hz sits 1.61 octaves below 100 Hz, so a 12 dB per octave slope takes 19.35 dB off its fundamental. A1 at 55.00 Hz sits 0.86 octaves below and loses 10.35 dB.

A slide from C1 to A1 therefore delivers 9.0 dB more into the drive at the top than at the bottom, and nine decibels into a nonlinear stage is not a trim. The top of the bend snarls and the bottom of it mutters. Depending on where you set the drive, that is either the best thing about the technique or the reason your low notes vanish.

Here is the part that catches people. The swing depends only on the size of the interval, not on where the cutoff sits: it is the slope multiplied by the slide in octaves. Nine semitones is three quarters of an octave, so 9.0 dB at 12 dB per octave and 18.0 dB at 24. Moving the cutoff up or down does nothing to it whatsoever. If the difference is a problem, narrow the interval, soften the slope, or automate the drive through the bend — and those are the only three doors. (Figures are the asymptotic slope; a real filter is a fraction of a decibel gentler within an octave of its corner.)

Two 808 notes at once, in exact frequencies

Never let two 808 notes overlap through a distortion stage. The reason is arithmetic, and it is why the mono setting on the instrument matters more than any tone control on it.

A nonlinear stage fed two tones produces sums and differences of them. Put E1 at 41.2034 Hz and A1 at 55.0000 Hz through the same clipper and the output carries 13.80 Hz, 27.41 Hz, 68.80 Hz and 96.20 Hz alongside the two notes and their harmonics. Check those against the key. 27.41 Hz lands 6 cents under A0. 68.80 lands 13 cents under C#2. 96.20 sits about a third of a semitone under G2. None of them belongs to E minor, none of them moves when the chords move, and 13.80 Hz is below what your speakers can produce but well inside what your limiter can see.

One voice, mono, and the problem cannot occur: overlapping notes trigger the glide instead of stacking, which is the behavior you were after anyway. The one safe overlap is an exact octave. Double the low note and every sum and difference lands back on that note's own harmonic ladder, so it reads as tone rather than as grit. Harmonic distortion has the general case.

Make room for the kick

Drill 808s often land close to the kick, and sometimes replace it. Where they collide, duck the 808 a few dB with sidechain, move the 808 note a little later, or drop the kick and let the 808's attack do the job. The details are in how to mix the kick and the 808.

Put a number on the duck. A sixteenth at 140 BPM is 107.14 ms, so an 80 ms release holds the 808 down for three quarters of the gap to the next sixteenth. That is fine when the kick is only on downbeats and audible as pumping the moment the pattern gets busy. Thirty to sixty milliseconds is the working range at this tempo. Set the release against the sixteenth, never against the beat, and if you change tempo, change the release. Sidechain compression has the rest of it.

Nudging is the cheaper fix and costs no level at all. A 1/64 note at 140 BPM is 26.79 ms and a 1/128 is 13.39 ms. Move the 808 fifteen milliseconds behind the kick and the two fundamentals stop arriving in the same instant while the groove stays where you put it. If fifteen is not enough, try twenty-five before you reach for a compressor.

Keep the whole thing mono

Everything under about 120 Hz, in mono, every time. A drill 808 has to survive a club rig, a phone and whatever a car does to the back of a mix, and all three of those collapse your stereo field in some direction.

The failure has a shape worth knowing. A widener that puts a delay between the channels builds a comb filter into the mono sum, with nulls at odd multiples of one over twice that delay. Say the delay works out at 12.14 ms. In mono that cancels 41.20 Hz almost completely, takes 9.95 dB off C1 at 32.70 Hz and 5.97 dB off A1 at 55.00 Hz, and leaves 82.41 Hz untouched. An E1 808 disappears while its own second harmonic stays loud.

Now slide that note and listen to what the arithmetic predicts: the fundamental climbs out of the null as the line bends up, so the bass surges and hollows across the bend, on some systems and not on others. That is the sound of a sub in stereo. Mono compatibility and phase cancellation cover the mechanism in full.

Headroom on a bass that keeps moving

A sliding 808 is harder to gain-stage than a held one, and the reason sits in the crest factor. A pure sine has the lowest peak-to-average ratio of any ordinary waveform: 3.01 dB, the square root of two written in decibels. That is the whole budget. Flatten a sine all the way to a square and you recover 3.01 dB of crest and not a decibel more, which is why loudness on an 808 comes from harmonics rather than from squashing.

A drill line spends that budget unevenly. The high-pass swing above means the harmonic content changes across every bend, sample length changes with pitch, and notes touch at the glide. Peak level follows all three. Set your gain on the busiest bar of the loudest section rather than on a soloed note, and expect the meter to move more than it would on a held sub. Crest factor and gain staging have the general version.

If you want the level back afterward, order matters: round the worst peaks first and let a limiter deal with what is left, which is the argument in clipper before limiter.

What each mistake sounds like

The last one is the mistake that survives longest into a finished record, because on a big system it can pass for groove. It stops passing on a laptop.

Check it before you call it done

1. Render eight bars and play them on a phone at arm's length.
2. Sum the master to mono and listen for the note that disappears.
3. Solo the 808 and run a tuner on the longest note in the phrase.
4. Loop the busiest bar and watch the peak meter through a full pass.
5. Turn the whole mix down 12 dB and check the line is still legible.
6. Bypass the chain, match levels, and only then decide it helped.

The phone is the test people skip and the one the record gets judged on, because a small driver reproduces almost none of the fundamental and all of the harmonics you added. How to make bass audible on phone speakers has the frequencies.

Glide in your DAW

Whatever the control is called, test it the same way: two semitones and twelve semitones at one setting, back to back. That tells you whether the instrument counts in milliseconds or in octaves, and everything about how you write the line follows from the answer.

What it costs

Three things, stated plainly. You give up chords, because one voice means one note and anything harmonic has to come from somewhere else in the arrangement. You give up some sub, because the split that makes the 808 audible on a phone moves level out of the fundamental and onto the ladder above it. And you give up predictability: a line whose pitch, length and harmonic content all change together is a line you gain-stage by the bar instead of by the note.

In exchange you get a bassline people can hear on a phone speaker, which is where most of them are going to hear it.

Questions people ask

How do I make my own 808s?

Start with a sine or triangle wave, add a quick pitch drop at the start of the note for punch, give it a decay that suits the tempo, and add distortion or saturation so it has harmonics. Save it as a sample or a synth patch with glide.

Is an 808 just a sine wave?

A clean one is close: a low, mostly pure tone with a pitch drop at the start. Drill and trap 808s are usually distorted, which adds harmonics so they're heard on small speakers.

How do I make my 808s in tune?

Check the sample's pitch with a tuner, set the sampler's root note to match, then write the line in the song's key. If the sample drifts in pitch, tune it by ear against the chords.

How do I make 808s slide?

Turn on glide or portamento, set the instrument to mono or legato, and overlap the end of one note with the start of the next. In FL Studio, slide notes in the piano roll do the same.

What BPM is drill?

Around 140 BPM with a half-time feel; 138 to 145 covers most of what you will hear. At 140 a bar lasts 1,714.29 ms and a sixteenth 107.14 ms. The snare on beat three gives a backbeat every 1,714.29 ms, the same backbeat rate as a 70 BPM record.

How long should the glide be on a drill 808?

Twenty to forty milliseconds at 140 BPM for a line written in sixteenths. A sixteenth is 107.14 ms, so 40 ms of glide leaves 67.14 ms of settled pitch, which is 2.77 cycles of an E1. Anything past 60 ms leaves under two cycles and the note stops sounding like a note.

Why do my 808 slides sound like a siren?

The glide time is longer than the gap between notes, so the pitch is still traveling when the next one fires and it never arrives anywhere. Halve the glide, or write the wide intervals on longer notes. On a constant-rate instrument, a wide slide takes proportionally longer, so the octave drop is usually the one to check.

Why do my drill 808s sound muddy?

Usually two notes overlapping into a distortion stage. Two low tones through one nonlinear stage make sums and differences of themselves: E1 and A1 together produce 13.80, 27.41, 68.80 and 96.20 Hz, and none of those are in the key. Set the instrument to one voice. If it persists, look at the kick colliding with the 808 and at why a mix reads muddy.

Should drill 808s be mono?

Yes, below roughly 120 Hz. A stereo sub cancels unpredictably in a mono sum, and a sliding note makes the cancellation move: a 12.14 ms interchannel delay nulls 41.20 Hz outright while leaving 82.41 Hz at full level, so the bass surges and hollows across the bend.

What's the difference between trap 808s and drill 808s?

Movement and register. Trap 808s more often hold a note and let the decay do the work; drill 808s bend between notes constantly, sit short, and answer the vocal. Drill also runs the pattern under a half-time snare, so the 808 is carrying melodic duty a held note cannot.

Do I need a kick if the 808 is this loud?

Not on every hit. A distorted 808 with a fast front edge already supplies the transient, and many drill patterns drop the kick wherever the 808 lands and keep it where the 808 rests. When you do want both, separate them in time rather than in level: 15 to 25 ms of offset costs nothing and fixes most of it. Layering kicks covers the other route.

Why does my 808 disappear on my phone?

Small drivers reproduce almost nothing at 32 to 65 Hz, so the fundamental never leaves the speaker. What gets out is the harmonic ladder above it, and the ear rebuilds the note from the spacing of the rungs. If you have not distorted the 808 there is no ladder to hear, which is the whole argument for the high-passed distorted copy.

Can I compress a drill 808?

You can, and it does less than people expect. A near-sine has a crest factor of 3.01 dB, so there is almost no peak sticking out for a compressor to grab. Use it for consistency between notes if the line is uneven, and get loudness from harmonics instead. Making 808s hit harder has the comparison.

Why does my 808 ring into the next chord on low notes?

Because a sampler that transposes by speed makes the sample longer as it goes down. Seven semitones down runs at 0.6674 times speed, so a 500 ms note becomes 749 ms, which at 140 BPM runs seven sixteenths instead of five. Trim the notes in the piano roll or use a fixed-time amplitude decay.

What BEEFY does

BEEFY is our saturation and loudness plugin, and 808s and bass are very much invited. SOFT CLIP, on by default, brings rounded, fuzzy edges to the loudest parts and adds harmonics above the low end, so the line is heard on small speakers. Push BEEF and a clean bass note moves toward a growl, and COOK makes the edge rounder or more bitten. Use it on the copy or return in the split above.

Every new instance opens the same way: SOFT CLIP on, JUICE at 0 dB, BEEF at 30, COOK at 30. On a high-passed 808 copy that is already a working start. Raise BEEF until the harmonics arrive and the line reads on the phone, set COOK by ear — lower for weight, higher for bite — and use JUICE to set what goes in. LIMIT is the other output stage, and on a sliding 808 the two are worth an A/B on the same bar, because the front edge of the note is what the ear uses to find the pitch and the two stages treat it differently. The output ceiling defaults to a −0.3 dBFS sample-peak limit, which is a sample-peak figure rather than a true-peak guarantee, so leave the true-peak check for the master. BEEFY is $39, Mac and Windows, AU, VST3 and standalone.

Everybody copies the pattern first. The ones who get it right copy the slide.

Keep reading

• How to make 808s hit harder — Tuning, the kick, the envelope, saturation, soft clipping and a mono low end.
• How to mix drums — Balance first, then EQ, compression, saturation and the bus.