How to Make Drill Beats: Sliding 808s, Hats, and the Drill Pocket

Drill is a genre with very few moving parts, which is exactly what makes it hard to produce well. There is no dense arrangement to hide behind, so every element is exposed and a weak 808 or a stiff hi-hat pattern is immediately obvious. Most drill beats that do not work fail on the bass, because the sliding 808 is the whole identity of the style.

The good news is that the framework is consistent. Get the tempo feel, the slide, and the space right, and you have something recognisable before you have written a melody.

Step 1: Set the Tempo and the Half-Time Feel

Work at 140 BPM and place your snare or clap on beat three only.

That single decision creates the half-time feel that defines the genre, making the beat feel like 70 BPM while the hi-hats run at full speed. Producers coming from trap often place snares on two and four out of habit, which immediately turns a drill beat into something else.

The friction is that half time makes arrangements feel slow to write. Four bars covers less musical ground than it does at trap tempos, so sections need to be longer than instinct suggests.

Step 2: Program the Slide Before the Sound

The 808 pattern comes first, and the slide is not decoration.

Write a bass line where notes overlap so the pitch glides continuously between them rather than restarting. In most DAWs this means overlapping the MIDI notes and enabling portamento or glide on the instrument. Set the glide time short enough that the movement is quick and long enough to hear, usually somewhere around 60 to 120 milliseconds.

The annoyance is that pitched 808 samples usually thin out during a slide because the sample is being stretched. A synthesised 808 handles glide far better, which is why most drill producers generate rather than sample their bass.

Step 3: Get the Hi-Hat Pocket Right

Drill hats do not sit on the grid, and this is the detail that separates a convincing beat from a stiff one.

Start with a sparse pattern rather than constant sixteenths, then add rolls that accelerate and decelerate rather than running at a fixed division. Nudge individual hits a few milliseconds early or late so the pattern breathes. Vary velocity heavily, with the main pulses loud and everything between them noticeably quieter.

The friction is that quantising undoes all of this. Turn quantise off before you start nudging, or the DAW will pull everything back to the grid the moment you edit a note.

Step 4: Write a Dark, Sparse Melody

Drill melodies are short, minor, and repetitive, and the temptation to write something more interesting is the main thing to resist.

Two or three notes in a minor scale, played on a plucked or bell-like sound, is enough. The melody functions as an atmosphere rather than a hook, so it should be able to loop for two minutes without becoming irritating. Strings and dark piano work well, and anything bright or major will fight the genre.

Filter the top end off whatever you choose so it sits behind the drums rather than above them.

Step 5: Leave the Arrangement Empty

The hardest habit for producers coming from other genres is adding less.

A drill beat is often just 808, kick, snare, hats, and one melodic element. There are no pads filling the background, no counter-melodies, and long stretches where elements drop out entirely. That emptiness is what gives the 808 and the vocal room to be the focus.

Build a sixteen bar section, then remove one element at a time and keep the version that sounds most like a record.

Step 6: Mix the Low End Deliberately

With so few elements, the kick and 808 relationship carries the whole beat.

High-pass the kick around 80Hz so the 808 owns the sub, and sidechain the 808 to the kick with a very fast release so it ducks only for the length of the kick transient. Then saturate the 808 until the slide is clearly audible on a phone speaker, because the melodic bass line is the part listeners need to hear most.

Drill rewards discipline over invention. The producers who are good at it are the ones who nail the slide and the hat pocket and then have the restraint to stop adding things.