Kick, snare, 808
Understory
One bar. Make a pocket with the three of them, then play it against a loop from another instrument.
Straight 16ths. The e and a sit halfway between the downbeat and the &.
The bar
Starter pocket, straight, no nudge. Tap a kick or snare step to cycle rest → hit → accent → ghost.
- ghost
- hit
- accent
Kick
Short body, clear click.
Snare
Lower, a little longer.
808
Synthesized sub with a little harmonic body. Not a sample.
Lanes slide when you nudge them. At 0 they sit on the grid. Early hits in a loop export live at the end of the bar, so the file stays one bar long.
808 note
Step 1, C2, 4 steps.
C2
Bend
Scoop in starts a fresh note away from its pitch and sweeps onto it. Fall off bends away over the end of the note — and if the next note glides, it slides on from there.
Glide ties a note to the one before it: that note holds until this one, and the pitch slides across as one continuous 808, with no re-strike. Chain several to bend fast. A note without glide strikes fresh — the 808 stays monophonic.
808 sound
The note panel sets each note. This sets the instrument every note plays through.
The default: a held sub with enough harmonics to read on small speakers.
Drive adds harmonics above the sub so the pitch still has a chest on small speakers. Decay fades each note from the moment it’s struck; at Hold it stays full until the note ends. Slides don’t re-strike, so a slide chain keeps fading, and a note coming back after a kick cut strikes again. Punch is the quick drop into pitch at the start of a fresh note — turn it down for clean, fast runs.
Kick and 808
Together is the baseline. Duck and cut are scheduled from the kick’s timing, the same way on playback and on the 808 stem. None of this flips polarity — that wouldn’t reliably clear the low end.
Both play as written. Use this before you decide the kick should push the bass around.
Off by default, so the three stems add up to the mix. Grit is printed on the full mix only.
Reference loop
Drop a loop from Quire, Eightfold, Aftertouch, or anywhere else. It plays beside the groove and is left out of every export. Tempo is whatever you type — nothing here detects or stretches it.
No loop loaded.
Export
The full mix is kick + snare + 808, then grit. Stems are before grit. The 808 stem already includes duck or cut, so it matches the relationship you hear even though the kick has its own file. Reference audio is never rendered. MIDI puts the drums on channel 10 (kick 36, snare 38) and the 808 on channel 1, with swing, nudge, length, and glide as portamento.
Loop renders an extra bar first, keeps the second, and checks the join. Ring-out starts from silence and lets the tails finish past the last bar.