Drill is a dark, menacing offshoot of trap, built around a sliding 808 that glides between notes, sparse and ominous minor-key melodies, skippy syncopated hi-hats with snappy snares, and a cold, spacious mood. UK drill usually sits around 140 BPM, though it is often counted in half time so it still feels slow and heavy. Here is what each part does and how they sit together.
Works in any DAW, with any sampler or synth. Nothing here needs a particular plugin.
Drill is a dark, menacing subgenre of trap-influenced hip-hop. It grew out of Chicago in the early 2010s, and a separate UK drill scene took shape in South London a few years later, usually around 140 BPM. The mood is the whole point: cold, sinister and spacious, with more menace and more empty room than ordinary trap.
The sound rests on a few parts: a sliding 808 bass that glides between notes and sits darker and further forward than in trap, sparse and ominous minor-key melodies from pianos, bells and dark strings, skippy syncopated hi-hats and snappy snares or claps, and a wide, cold arrangement with a lot of space. As with trap, most of the craft is leaving room rather than filling it, so only a couple of parts play at once.
The Chicago scene around the Chief Keef era in the early 2010s and, later, the Brooklyn scene around the Pop Smoke era are often named as touchstones, though the exact histories and who influenced whom are debated.
| Part | What it does | Rule of thumb |
|---|---|---|
| 808 bass | Carries the low end and glides the bassline | A tuned sub that slides between notes, dark and forward |
| Kick | The hard downbeat | Locked to the 808, on chosen syncopated spots |
| Snare or clap | The backbeat | Snappy and often offbeat, with a recognisable bounce |
| Hi-hats | The movement and the skip | Skippy and syncopated, with triplet and stutter rolls |
| Melody | The mood and the harmony | Sparse, ominous, minor key: piano, bells, dark strings |
| Space | The room the parts sit in | Cold and wide, few parts at once |
Drill and trap are close relatives, and drill is best understood as a darker, more menacing branch of it. The main differences are in feel and detail: drill leans colder and more sinister, the 808s slide and glide far more, and the drum patterns are distinct, with UK drill in particular carrying a recognisable hi-hat and snare bounce. If you want the parent style first, see how to make trap.
The rest of this page takes the drill parts one at a time: the sliding 808, the drums, and the dark melody. A good sound and a good pattern are separate wins, so you can work on them one at a time.
The drill 808 is a tuned sub bass that slides between notes with glide, sitting darker and further forward in the mix than in ordinary trap. Tune it to the key, set it to mono with glide on, and let the pitch scoop from note to note as it plays the bassline.
An 808 is a pitched note, so it has to agree with the music, tuned to the key and usually following the root of the chord or the melody above it. Drill tends to push the 808 darker and further forward than trap does, so it reads as the lead low voice rather than just a rumble under the beat. For how to build the sound itself, from the sine core and the long decay to the saturation that keeps it audible on small speakers, see how to make an 808.
The sliding, gliding 808 is the signature of drill, more so than of most trap. The pitch scoops from one note to the next instead of jumping, and in drill it happens often, sometimes on almost every note, so the bass sounds like it is constantly moving. You get it with glide, also called portamento: set the instrument to mono, one note at a time, turn glide on, and the pitch slurs between overlapping notes. Short glide gives a quick scoop, longer glide a slow slur, and where you place the notes decides where the slides land.
Like trap, drill usually lets the 808 carry the whole low end and double as the bassline, with no separate bass part. Lock it to the kick so the two read as one bottom, either by ducking the 808 a touch each time the kick lands or by tuning the kick to sit with it. Because the 808 glides so much, the note movement is the bassline, so the shape of those slides matters as much as the sound.
Program skippy, syncopated hi-hats and snappy snares or claps over a hard kick that locks to the 808. The hats skip and stutter rather than run straight, and the snare often lands off the main beat with a recognisable bounce, which UK drill in particular is known for.
The kick is hard and usually locked to the 808, landing on the downbeats and any syncopated spots the bassline moves to. The snare or clap is the backbeat, but in drill it is often snappy and placed off the straight beat rather than flat on it. UK drill is known for a particular snare bounce, where the snare and a second hit fall a fraction apart or land on an offbeat, giving the groove its skip. Keep the transients snappy so the hits cut through the space around them.
The hats carry the skip in drill. Rather than a straight run, they are syncopated and skippy, with triplet and stutter rolls where the hat retriggers several times in a beat, and clear changes in volume so the line breathes instead of buzzing. The pattern often leaves gaps and lands off the grid, which is a large part of what separates a drill beat from a straight trap one.
Much of what makes a beat read as drill, and UK drill especially, is the interplay between that skippy hat pattern and the snappy, offbeat snare. Programmed together they give a rolling, lurching bounce rather than a flat backbeat. It is worth spending time getting the snare placement and the hat skip to lock, because that groove, more than any single sound, is what tells a listener this is drill.
Loop just the drums and the 808 for a minute. If it feels cold and heavy while the hats skip and the snare bounces off the beat, the groove is doing its job. If it feels busy or marches straight, the fix is usually to move the snare off the beat and thin the hats, not to add more.
Keep it sparse, ominous and in a minor key. Most drill melodies are a short loop of a few notes on a dark piano, bells or strings, sitting in a lot of empty space so the sliding 808 and the drums have room to hit.
Drill melodies sit in a minor key, which is where the cold, sinister feel comes from. Dark pianos, bells, muted or tense strings and the occasional flute are common voices, usually thin and ominous rather than warm. A simple minor phrase of a few notes, repeated, is enough, and often a single held or picked-out figure is all a drill beat carries up top.
The arrangement stays wide and cold. A drill beat is defined as much by the empty room as by the parts, so a loop with two or three elements and a lot of silence around them hits harder than a busy one. Leave space for the 808 and the drums, and only bring the melody forward where it earns its place.
Whatever the melody plays, that is the key the 808 has to follow, and because the 808 glides so much the two are tightly bound. Write or pick the melody first, note its key, then tune the 808 to the root underneath it so the sliding bass reads as part of the music rather than a rumble fighting it.
Everything above is a handful of parts: a sliding, gliding 808, a hard kick, a snappy syncopated snare, skippy hats and a dark minor loop. The sounds are not the hard bit. The work is the writing, the actual note movement of the 808 as it glides from note to note and the shape of the riff over it, and that is a job you do not have to do by hand.
REHEAT is a writing tool. It generates the sliding, gliding 808 bassline, the note movement drill is built on, and the dark minor-key riffs that sit over it, so once you have a sound you like you do not also have to labour over the notes. You either drag the line out as MIDI, or play it live through your own 808 or synth. It runs as an Audio Unit, a VST3 and an AAX.
The sound design stays yours. REHEAT supplies the notes and the movement, the sliding 808 and the minor riff, and you decide what plays them, so you can change the sound without redoing the part.
Free to hear in the browser, no signup. Everything above still works by hand in any DAW, which is rather the point of writing it down.
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