Beat Breakdown: A Lo-Fi Hip-Hop Beat from Scratch
Build a dusty lo-fi groove one layer at a time: kick and snare, swung hats, ghost notes. Every stage is playable, so you hear each decision as it happens.
Beat Breakdown takes one groove apart, one layer at a time. Every stage below is a working sequencer: press play, listen, then change it. The pattern in your browser is the same pattern the prose is describing.
Spec. 82 bpm · 56% swing · 16 steps · synthesized kit. Tap any step to cycle it through soft, medium, and accent. Tap a track label to mute it.
Step 1: the frame
Kick on one, snare on three. That’s the whole skeleton of boom bap, and it barely changes across a thousand records. The extra kick just before the halfway point is what keeps it from marching.
Play it and let it loop twice. It’s correct, and it’s stiff:
An interactive step sequencer for this pattern (kick, snare, 82 bpm): tap a step to cycle it through soft, medium, and accent, then press play. It needs JavaScript. If you're seeing this text, your browser isn't running it. On an iPhone, check the ringer switch if you see the playhead but hear nothing.
Nothing is wrong with that pattern. It just sounds typed rather than played, because every hit is exactly where the grid says it should be.
Step 2: hats, and the swing that makes them breathe
Now the eighth-note hats, and the single most important number in this genre: swing. At 50% the offbeat hats sit exactly halfway between beats. Push it to 56% and they land late, dragging slightly behind the grid.
That drag is the whole feel. Same notes, different clock:
An interactive step sequencer for this pattern (kick, snare, hat, 82 bpm): tap a step to cycle it through soft, medium, and accent, then press play. It needs JavaScript. If you're seeing this text, your browser isn't running it. On an iPhone, check the ringer switch if you see the playhead but hear nothing.
Mute the hats and the swing disappears from your ear even though the kick and snare haven’t moved. Swing lives in the fastest layer.
Step 3: ghost notes
Look at the hat row: some cells are dim, some are mid, one is bright. That’s velocity, and it’s what separates a programmed beat from a played one. The dim hits are ghost notes, barely there, filling space between the loud ones. The bright hit is an accent that tells you where the bar turns over.
Try it directly: tap any dim hat cell twice to make it an accent, and listen to how much heavier the groove gets. Then put it back.
An interactive step sequencer for this pattern (kick, snare, hat, rim, 82 bpm): tap a step to cycle it through soft, medium, and accent, then press play. It needs JavaScript. If you're seeing this text, your browser isn't running it. On an iPhone, check the ringer switch if you see the playhead but hear nothing.
The rimshot near the end of the bar is doing the same job as a ghost note, one step off the snare, quiet enough that you feel it more than you hear it.
What to change first
- Swing between 54% and 60%. Below that it stiffens, above it starts to lurch. This is where the head-nod lives.
- Move one kick. Drag the second kick a step earlier or later and the groove changes character completely.
- Delete the accent. Take the loud hat down to normal and hear the bar stop announcing itself.
Nothing you change here is saved, so there’s no way to break it. Reset puts the original pattern back.
The version worth keeping is usually the one you stopped fiddling with.