Here is a trap beat. Here is what would have made it drill.
This came out of the library exactly as its brief was written — a good, dark, usable beat at 138 BPM. It is also not drill, and the reason is instructive: nothing in the brief asked for the two things that separate them.
| Same brief, changed | What you would hear instead |
|---|---|
| “heavy 808 bass” → “sliding 808s that glide between notes” | The bass starts moving under the beat — the single most drill thing there is |
| “fast rolling hi-hats” → “skittering off-beat hi-hats, triplet bursts” | The top loses its metronome feel and starts stuttering |
| add “UK drill, 140 BPM, sparse dark melody” | Fewer notes, more space, the melody as a hook rather than a bed |
The prompt that made it
“Dark street trap, 138 BPM, heavy 808 bass, hard kick, crisp snare, fast rolling hi-hats, dark piano melody, deep atmospheric pads, aggressive but melancholic mood, underground Latin trap feel”
Dark street trap at 138 BPM: heavy 808s that sit on one note, rolling hi-hats on the grid, a dark piano line. Everything the brief asked for arrived. 2:07.
You do not need all three. The 808 line alone gets you most of the way, which is why it is the first thing to write and the easiest to leave out.
Trap or drill, side by side
If you only remember one table from this page, this is the one.
| Trap | Drill | |
|---|---|---|
| 808 bass | Hits a note and holds it | Slides between notes, often two or three in a bar |
| Hi-hats | Fast rolls, locked to the grid | Skittering, off-beat, bursts of triplets |
| Melody | Can be busy — piano, bells, synth lines | Sparse and eerie: a few notes with space around them |
| Tempo written | 138–150 | 138–145 (UK) or 140–150 (New York) |
| Feel | Bounce | Menace and drag |
Which drill you mean
The three strands people ask for sound different enough that naming one saves you a generation.
- UK drill — “UK drill, sliding 808, skittering hi-hats, sparse minor melody, 140 BPM”. The darkest and most spacious of the three.
- New York drill — “NY drill, sampled melody, hard snare, 145 BPM”. Often built on a flipped melody rather than a synth line.
- Jersey / club drill — “Jersey drill, bed-squeak kick pattern, bouncy, 140 BPM”. Same 808 idea over a club drum pattern.
Add one mood word and one melodic instrument and the brief is done: “UK drill, sliding 808s, skittering hi-hats, cold detuned bell melody, menacing, 140 BPM, instrumental”.
The switch, again, because it is the one that gets missed
Across beat requests here, about three in four did not turn on the Instrumental switch — so the generator wrote a lyric and performed it over the beat that was asked for. If you want something to rap on, the switch above the Create button is not optional, no matter how many times the word “beat” appears in your sentence.
Sources
Written and fact-checked by the Tunely team · Updated