Playground
No lesson, no right answer. Thirty-three classic patterns, a live device, and every step yours to change.
Load a groove, hear what makes it work, then take it apart. Everything on this page is a starting point — there is nothing here you can break.
The device below is the real thing: ← → move between tracks, the OLED and the step LEDs are the runtime’s own output. The sounds you hear are generic browser drums, not the tbd 16’s engines — see Machines for what it actually has on board.
How to use it
Pick a genre, pick a pattern, press Load pattern. Then press play and start changing things while it runs — that is the fastest way to hear what each part is doing.
Three things worth trying on any pattern you load:
- Mute a track. Click a row name to silence it. Take the hats out of a house beat and you will hear how much of the groove they were carrying.
- Move one hit. Drag a kick one step later. Most grooves live or die on a single note being early or late.
- Turn up the swing. Anything in the hip-hop, garage or funk sections wants it. Straight sixteenths become a shuffle somewhere around 20–40%.
Where the patterns come from
These are the standard drum-machine grooves that circulate freely among producers — the same set often published as Pocket Operations. They are starting points that generations of records were built on, not rules.
Each pattern loads its own tempo, and some load swing too, because a groove at the wrong tempo teaches the wrong thing.
One bar, sixteen steps
Everything here is a single bar, the same sixteen steps the device shows on its step buttons — so what you see in the grid and what the device shows are always the same pattern.
That is not much of a limit. Almost every groove in the list above is one bar repeating; what makes them sound different from each other is which sixteen steps, not how many.
Ready to build one from scratch instead? Start at lesson 1.