Make beats
with BeatLab

There are two ways to run BeatLab. Both are free and have the same studio.

1. Open the studio and click anywhere once. Browsers only start sound after a click.
2. In the Brain panel, pick a style, then press Make a beat. Drums, 808, chords and a melody appear as patterns on the playlist.
3. Press Space to play. Change anything you like, then press Ctrl+R to export.

Everything saves as you go. Your beats live in this browser on this computer. To move a beat to another computer, or keep a backup, use File, then Save as a project file.

The top bar has the transport, the song position, the tempo, the key and the pattern picker. Under it is the main screen, and under that the hardware: the Brain, 16 drum pads and a turntable.

Two layouts. Rig shows one big screen with tabs. DAW, top right, gives you FL-style floating windows you can drag, resize and close (F12 closes them all). Switch whenever you like.

On a phone or tablet. Narrower screens show one screen at a time, with a tab bar at the bottom. Song is the playlist, Beat the channel rack, Keys the piano roll and Mix the mixer. Make holds the Brain, the drum pads and big buttons for Ask, Hum it, Mix doctor, Sounds, Listen, Master and Export. Channel windows open full screen, menus slide up from the bottom, and ⋯ at the top has projects, redo, the metronome and settings. Play also stops. The step grid scrolls sideways when it doesn’t fit.

Dark or white. The Dark or white studio button in the top bar switches the studio’s look.

The Brain panel writes a whole beat in one press. Pick one of these styles:

• Energy sets how busy the drums are. Complexity sets how rich the chords and the melody get.
• FL sounds or Sample kits picks real drum kits and instruments that suit the style. AI feel gives the drums a drummer’s timing. Auto mix balances the levels when the beat is made.
• New part rewrites one part and keeps the rest: new drums, new chords, a new 808 or a new melody. It can also ask the AI to write the hook melody or play the verse drums.

Your own channels and recordings stay when you make a new beat. Ctrl+Z brings the last beat back.

Press Ctrl+K (or Ask in the Brain panel) and type a request in plain words. The brain shows you its plan first. Press Enter and it does it as ordinary edits you can change. One Ctrl+Z takes the whole request back. Join several requests with commas or “and”.

These are real examples. Each shows what the brain says it will do:

The smart brain. For anything the brain doesn’t understand, turn on Smart brain in the New part menu. A small free AI model (Qwen 2.5) then rewrites your request into commands BeatLab knows. It downloads once, about 1 GB, and needs a browser with WebGPU, like current Chrome or Edge. It runs on your computer, and it can only do what the brain can do.

The free Magenta models from Google do the musical parts: Humanize gives programmed drums a drummer’s timing, Vary writes a variation (press again for the next), and Fill plays a drum fill.

In the channel rack

• Click or drag across steps to paint them. Drag from a lit step to clear.
• Shift-click a step for a roll of 2, 3 or 4 hits. Right-click it for velocity, chance and ratchet.
• The mouse wheel over a step changes its velocity. Graph draws velocity or chance for every step at once.
• Drum kit loads a whole kit onto your drum channels, with the hits switching takes by how hard they’re played.

In the piano roll

• The tools: draw P, paint B, delete D, mute T, slice C and select E. Right-click deletes a note.
• Chord stamp places a whole chord per click. Scale snap keeps new and moved notes in the song’s key.
• Ctrl+Q quantizes, Ctrl+L makes notes legato, and Humanize loosens timing and velocity like a player.

Recording

• Audio: in Song mode, press R. After a one-bar count-in, the microphone records onto an audio track from the song position. Press Space to stop.
• Notes: in Pattern mode, press R and play a MIDI keyboard, the pads, or your computer keyboard. Turn that on with Alt+T.
• F10 opens the audio and MIDI settings: count-in, hearing yourself, the audio buffer, a recording offset, and MIDI devices.

Got a hook in your head? Hum it, sing it or whistle it, and BeatLab writes the notes for you.

1. Select the channel the melody should go on (a melody, chord or bass channel), then press Hum it in the piano roll. You can also type “let me hum a melody” after Ctrl+K.
2. Allow the microphone if the browser asks. The beat plays a one-bar count-in.
3. Hum through one pass of the pattern, on “da” or “la”. When the pattern ends, the notes appear: in the song’s key, on the beat, in the right octave for that part.

Wear headphones, so the beat doesn’t leak into the microphone. Short separate syllables give the cleanest notes. Ctrl+Z takes the notes back if you want another go.

• Effects: click an empty slot on a mixer strip to add an effect. Right-click one to bypass, reorder or remove it. Each strip holds up to 8. The channel’s window shows their knobs.
• Duck on a strip ties that channel to the kick, so the 808 or the chords dip out of the way on each hit.
• Buses: press Bus to add one, then route channels into it from the strip, to treat a group together.
• Automation: in the playlist, Automate adds a clip for a channel’s volume, filter cutoff or pan. Drag its points to shape it.
• Auto mix measures every part and sets the levels where a balanced beat has them. A second press changes nothing once it’s balanced.
• The master chain in the Master view: glue compression, stereo width, the limiter ceiling and the master volume, with loudness meters that match the export.

Press Mix doctor in the mixer, or type “check my mix”. It plays the hook through part by part and measures it the way an engineer listens, in 10 to 20 seconds. Then it gives you:

• A score out of 100: Ready to release, Nearly there, or Needs work.
• A chart of your mix’s octaves against a finished mix’s. Orange bars are off by more than 3 dB.
• Every problem in plain words, each with its own Fix button. Fix all does them together, listens again, and shows the new score. One Ctrl+Z undoes every fix.

Every channel plays one of BeatLab’s own instruments, a sample, or an FL Studio instrument. Open a channel’s window by clicking its name in the channel rack. Presets are under the arrows by the plugin’s name. In the browser (F8 in the DAW layout), click the star on any plugin to keep it in Favourites.

Instruments

Effects

Four effects run sample by sample on the browser’s audio thread: Time warp, Tune, the Pitch shifter and the Transient shaper. Time warp follows the bar line, and Tune follows the song’s key, unless you pick another.

• BeatLab’s own sounds: Trap, Drill, Lofi, Boom Bap and House kits (three takes of every hit), five 808s and five loops, in the Sounds view. Click a sound to hear it. Load puts it on the selected channel, or drag it onto any channel.
• Your own samples: drop a WAV or MP3 onto any channel, or onto the playlist as an audio clip. Drop a loop onto a Slicer channel to play its slices.
• FL Studio’s packs, on Windows: if FL Studio is installed, BeatLab finds its packs on its own, with multi-sampled instruments and kits with velocity layers.
• FL Studio’s packs, on the website: in Sounds, press Connect FL Studio and pick the Packs folder, usually C:\Program Files\Image-Line\FL Studio 2025\Data\Patches\Packs. Chrome calls it uploading, but nothing leaves your computer. Connect it again on each visit. Beats keep their FL sounds in the meantime.

In the Listen view, drop in a song or one of your own beats, or search for a song. The search uses Apple’s free 30-second previews; an Apple Music link works too. BeatLab shows the song’s tempo, key, loudness and the closest styles, and can:

• Make a beat like this (the button names the closest style), at its tempo and in its key. Tick Copy its drum groove to take its timing too. This works best on beats without vocals.
• Compare in the Master view, where the song plays at your mix’s loudness, so you hear the difference and not the volume.

Press Ctrl+R (or Export, top right). Pick the pattern or the full song, then what to write:

• Audio: the full mix as WAV (16, 24 or 32-bit), plus MP3 at 320 kbps if you like. Stems are one file per part, and dry stems have no effects, for mixing fresh.
• Extra versions: instrumental (no recordings), without the melody (for vocals), and drums only.
• Loudness: as mixed, or mastered to a target such as Spotify and YouTube at -14 LUFS, with peaks kept under -1 or -0.3 dB.
• MIDI for every part, always. Bass can be written around C5, for 808 samples in FL, or at its real pitch, for synth plugins.

On Windows, the files land in a folder inside BeatLab’s exports folder, with a loudness report. On the website, they download together as one zip.

Into FL Studio

1. Drag a part’s .mid file into FL Studio’s channel rack. Choose the instrument you want it played by.
2. Drag the WAV stems into the playlist to keep BeatLab’s sounds, or the mix as a reference.

• BeatLab saves as you work. Ctrl+S saves a version you can go back to, and Alt+N saves one with a name.
• Ctrl+O opens another project. File, then New project, starts a fresh one.
• Save as a project file writes one .beatlab file with your recordings inside. Use it for backups and to move a beat to another computer.

BeatLab follows FL Studio’s keys. A few that Chrome keeps for itself use Alt instead. F1 shows this list in the studio.