How to Make an 808: Sound, Tuning, Glide and Mix

How to make an 808: start from a sine wave, drop its pitch about an octave in the first 30 to 50 ms of each hit, let it ring, saturate it so small speakers hear it, tune it to your key and glide between notes. Or hand the job to your personal music producer: in Veena, CoProducer builds the 808 on Veena's own synth, free in your browser.

Veena is an AI DAW with a personal music producer built in. Describe the song you want and CoProducer builds it with you — beats, chords, melody, arrangement and mix — as real tracks you can edit, mix and export. Free, in your browser.

The name comes from Roland's TR-808 drum machine, whose bass drum producers stretched into a tuned, ringing bass. Every modern 808, from a hard trap slide to a short plugg bounce, is the same five parts turned differently.

What an 808 is made of

How to make an 808, step by step

Each step below has the move by hand, the same move in Veena, and the one sentence that gets it from CoProducer. Open a free project, click Create MIDI Clip in the transport bar and choose Melody.

1. Start with a sine

By hand. One oscillator, sine wave, mono. Amp envelope: 1 ms attack, sustain at zero, release around 150 ms. A zero attack can click; a slow one loses the punch.

In Veena. In the clip's Instrument tab, open the Bass + 808s shelf and pick 808 Long. Click Expand to see the whole panel: OSC 1, OSC 2, Filter, Envelopes, LFO and Output. The sine is already there.

Ask CoProducer: "Put an 808 under this beat, on 808 Long."

2. Add the pitch drop

By hand. Route a pitch envelope to the oscillator: start 12 semitones above the note and fall in 30 to 50 ms. Push it to 18 or 24 semitones for a harder, cartoonish "boing"; pull it back to 5 or 7 for a smooth 808 that glides well.

In Veena. Turn DROP. For reference, 808 Long falls an octave in 45 ms, 808 Hard drops 18 semitones in 25 ms, and 808 Glide only 7, so its slide does the moving.

Ask CoProducer: "Give the 808 a harder drop on every hit."

What good sounds like: a knock you feel on the kick's beat, then a steady note. If you hear a laser zap, the drop is too deep or too slow.

3. Set the length

By hand. Short decays (150 to 300 ms) bounce under fast hi-hats; long ones (700 ms to 1.2 s) hold the root through the bar. Keep the release short, or the tail smears into the next note.

In Veena. Turn DECAY, or set Amp Decay in milliseconds on the Envelopes card. Then draw notes with the Draw Tool and drag each note's right edge: note length is how you control each 808. 808 Short rings for about 150 ms; 808 Long for about 1.2 seconds.

Ask CoProducer: "Shorten the 808s so each one stops before the next kick."

4. Add harmonics with drive

By hand. Saturate the 808 so it grows harmonics a phone speaker can play. Keep the sub clean: saturate only above about 90 Hz, or blend a distorted copy under a clean one.

In Veena. Turn DRIVE. On Veena's 808s it's split: only the part above about 90 Hz is driven, so the sub stays solid. 808 Distorted splits at 80 Hz and drives harder. For more, add the Distortion effect in the clip's FX tab and keep its Mix under 50% for a parallel blend.

Ask CoProducer: "Add drive so the 808 reads on phone speakers, keep the sub clean."

5. Tune it to your key

By hand. An 808 is a bass, so it plays the chord roots. Keep the fundamental low enough to be sub but high enough to be a note:

In Veena. Set the key in the transport bar (24 keys to choose from). Building on a loop? Open its Waveform tab and press Find Key. In the piano roll, Ctrl+↑ and Ctrl+↓ (Cmd on a Mac) move selected notes an octave.

Ask CoProducer: "Write the 808 on the chord roots, low, around F1."

6. Glide between notes

By hand. Switch the synth to mono or legato, set glide to 60 to 150 ms, and overlap the two notes you want to connect. Slide up an octave into a downbeat, or down a fifth at the end of a phrase. Slide every note and none of them matter.

In Veena. The 808 presets play one note at a time, so overlapping notes slide on their own. GLIDE sets the time; 808 Glide is built for drill at 150 ms. (808 Classic Kick, the drum-machine voice with TUNE, TONE, DECAY and PUNCH, doesn't glide.)

Ask CoProducer: "Slide up an octave into bar 4, and drop down at the end of bar 8."

7. Make it sit with the kick

By hand. Put 808 hits on most kick hits, and let one sound own the sub: a short, clicky kick on top of a long 808 is the classic. Keep the 808 mono and centred. Many producers also duck the 808 a few dB whenever the kick hits.

In Veena. CoProducer doesn't write parts in a fixed order: when the 808 has to lock to the drums, it waits for them and reads the kick notes actually placed, so the 808 lands with the kick. Balance the two with the faders in the Mixer.

Ask CoProducer: "Make the kick and the 808 stop fighting." It carves the space with level and EQ, and one Ctrl+Z undoes the whole pass.

What a finished 808 sounds like

• On headphones: a sub you feel in your chest and a note you can hum.
• On a phone: you still hear the bassline, thanks to the drive.
• With the kick: one hit, not two. The click is on top, the 808 is underneath.
• Across the chords: every note in key, no tail smearing into the next.

When all four hold, you're done. For patterns to play it with, see the trap 808 bassline guide and drum programming for trap. Want the whole beat around it? The free online beat maker opens on a 16-step drum grid, the bassline generator writes basslines that lock to your chords and kick, and the AI beat maker builds drums, 808 and melody from one sentence. The 808 knobs are covered in basslines and 808s in Veena.

Related reading: drum programming for trap · how to layer drums · mixing bass