Phonk is a small number of parts done in a dark, lo-fi way: a pitched cowbell playing a simple riff, a distorted 808, hard drums, chopped and pitched vocal samples in the Memphis style, and a heavy tape and cassette texture over the top. 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.
Phonk is a dark, lo-fi and aggressive style that grew out of 1990s Memphis rap. It keeps that era's murky, menacing feel and rebuilds it out of a few fixed parts: a pitched cowbell melody, a distorted 808 bass, hard drums, chopped Memphis-style vocals, and a thick layer of tape and cassette wear. The mood is the point, so most of the craft is keeping it dark and letting the parts hit hard rather than adding more of them.
The same handful of elements shows up from track to track. This is the whole kit:
| Element | What it is | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Cowbell melody | A cowbell tuned across the keys, playing a short riff | Carries the tune and the hook, in place of a lead synth |
| 808 bass | A long sub tone pushed into distortion or overdrive | The low end and most of the aggression |
| Drums | A hard trap-style or boom-bap kit | The groove and the push under everything |
| Vocals | Chopped and pitched samples in the Memphis style | The mood and the menace, used more for feel than for words |
| Texture | Tape and cassette wear over the whole beat | The lo-fi grit that ties it all together |
Phonk usually sits around 130 to 160 BPM, felt heavy and slow even at the faster end. Drift phonk, the variant built for driving and car videos, sits faster and cleaner, often up around 160 BPM and beyond, with the cowbell pushed to the front and the grit pulled back a little. These are rough ranges, not rules, and plenty of tracks sit outside them.
Load a cowbell sound into a sampler, spread it across the keyboard so each key plays it at a different pitch, and write a short, repeating riff with it. The cowbell is the melody and the hook in most phonk, so it does the job a lead synth would do in another style.
A cowbell is normally a single unpitched percussion hit, the classic being the one from the TR-808 drum machine. Drop it into a sampler and map it across the keys so it plays back higher or lower depending on the note. That turns a percussion sound into a tuned instrument you can play a melody on, which is the trick the whole genre is built around.
Keep it simple and keep it repeating. A few notes in a minor scale, looped over a bar or two, is the whole hook in a lot of phonk. It is meant to be catchy and a little menacing rather than clever, and the repetition is what makes it stick. Pick a key first, because the 808 will be tuned to match it.
Run an 808 sub bass through distortion or overdrive until it growls, tune it to the key of the cowbell riff, and pair it with a hard, dry drum kit. The distortion on the 808 is a big part of where phonk gets its aggression.
An 808 is the long, tuned sub tone you get by stretching out a kick sample. In phonk you push it into distortion or overdrive so it stops being clean and starts to growl and buzz, with harmonics you can actually hear on small speakers. Tune it to the key of the cowbell so the two agree. Because it is so low and so long it will clash with a separate kick, so either let the 808 be the kick, or keep them apart in time so they do not pile up.
Two common approaches. Trap-style: a heavy kick, a snare or clap felt in half time, and fast hi-hat rolls, written around 130 to 160 BPM but felt slow. Boom-bap-style: a harder, swung backbeat with the snare on beats 2 and 4, closer to the Memphis records phonk came from. Either way the drums stay hard and dry. The backbeat and swing that both kits are built on are covered in how to make hip hop beats.
Age the whole beat with tape and cassette wear, then add chopped Memphis-style vocals for the mood. The texture is saturation, a rolled-off top end, hiss and a little wobble, all stacked subtly so the track sounds like a worn tape rather than a clean digital file.
This is the layer that makes it lo-fi. Tape or tube saturation to glue and dirty the parts, a low-pass filter to take the sparkle off, a bed of cassette hiss under everything, a touch of wow and flutter so the pitch drifts, and often a light bit-crush for grit. Keep each one subtle and let them add up. The same wear, aimed at a softer mood, is the basis of lo-fi, which has its own walkthrough in how to make a lo-fi beat.
The classic phonk vocal is a chopped, pitched vocal sample in the old Memphis rap style, low and slurred and half-buried in the mix. It is used for mood and menace more than for the words, so you chop it into pieces, pitch it down, and let it sit under the beat like another texture rather than a clear vocal line.
Phonk leans hard on samples, so this one matters. A sample is someone else's recording, and using a record you do not have permission to use is copyright infringement no matter how much you chop it, pitch it, or bury it in tape hiss. So work from material you are allowed to use: your own recordings, royalty-free or properly cleared sample packs, or vocals you record yourself. Plenty of strong phonk is built entirely from played parts and cleared sounds.
Most of a phonk beat is quick to program once the cowbell and the 808 are tuned. The part that is genuinely fiddly to fake by hand is the worn, cassette-aged texture underneath, the layer that keeps a clean loop from sounding like a clean loop.
SILT is a generative tape-loop instrument. Drop your own sample or loop in, or play a phrase, and it gives it the dusty, cassette, wobbling lo-fi character phonk is built on, the tape wear and dropout that makes a clean sound feel like an old recording. It runs in the browser, or as an Audio Unit, a VST3, an AAX and a standalone.
It works on your own material, so the character comes from a loop you are allowed to use. It does not tune your cowbell or program your drums; it makes the worn, moving cassette layer that the rest of the beat sits on.
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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