How to make a beat
Each row is a sound and each square is a sixteenth of a bar. Tap a square to turn a hit on, tap it again to turn it off. Press play and the bar loops. Most beats start the same way: a kick on 1 and 3, a snare on 2 and 4, hats on every other square, then one hit moved somewhere it doesn't belong. The grid is the same sixteen sounds as the drum pad, so what you played there you can program here.
Tempo runs from 40 to 240, like the metronome, and swing pushes every second sixteenth late, from straight to a shuffle. One bar is a tab; press Add bar for a second, up to four, and the loop plays through all of them.
Share it as a link
Press Copy link and you get a link with the whole beat in it: the pattern, the tempo and the swing. Send it, and whoever opens it hears your beat and can change it, without touching yours. There's nothing to save and no account. The link doesn't carry your own sounds, so a beat built on them plays with the standard kit for other people.
Download WAV or MIDI
WAV gives you the beat as built, all its bars, played once and cut so it loops seamlessly, at the exact tempo and starting on beat one, so it drops into a project without trimming. MIDI gives you the hits as notes, one note per row on the standard drum map, so you can play them with any drum kit in your DAW and keep editing there.
Your own sounds
Drop a sound on any row and the row plays it: a snare you recorded, a door, a word. The sound is saved in this browser, so it's there next time you open the page. If the sound is on your Mac but not in a file, DOT records whatever your Mac plays and gives you the file in one click: plastic.audio/dot.
