Inside BeatForge
One machine. Six ways to work.
VST3 · AU · AAX · CLAP · Standalone | macOS & Windows | v4.6
40+ circuit-modeled drum and bass synths — full 606, 808 and 909 kits, FM, Karplus, hoovers and Reese basses — a parameter lock on every step, pattern chaining, live pad recording. And it still reads your REX loops natively.
Full version while you trial. No card. One-time purchase, free updates.
“A complete beat-making laboratory packed with features producers have been asking for.” — Rekkerd.org review
Pick a groove, then make it yours — click steps in and out, drag a step up or down to pitch it (double-click puts it back), swap any track’s engine, twist the macros while it plays. That per-step pitch is a parameter lock; in the plugin every knob locks that way. This is BeatForge’s own DSP compiled to WebAssembly; the plugin goes much further.
The sound engine
Every voice in BeatForge is synthesized from scratch — the 606, 808 and 909 kits are circuit-modeled down to their saturation stages, and next to them sit FM kicks, Karplus snares, vintage DCOs, hoovers, Reese basses and supersaws. Tap any engine to hear it, synthesized live in your browser by the same code that runs in the plugin.
In the plugin, every engine runs through Koren 12AX7 tube saturation, the Sculptor drum EQ, per-track delay and vintage lo-fi — see the full spec.
New in 4.6.0
All sixteen voices rebuilt component by component from Roland’s own service notes — kick, snare, toms, congas, rimshot, claves, clap, maracas, cowbell, both hi-hats and, for the first time anywhere in BeatForge, the cymbal with its real swell. No samples. No matching EQ. Every filter, every time constant, every level traces back to a drawn component or it does not ship.
The voices are not sixteen separate plugins. They share the machine’s noise bus and trigger bus the way the hardware does: the snare and clap breathe together from the same noise source, a dense accented pattern sags the trigger rail by the amount the circuit dictates, and the closed hat chokes the open hat through the circuit — not with a volume fade.
The 808 has one accent bus, so BeatForge has one ACCENT row above your tracks. Draw a step and every voice reacts as its own circuit dictates: the snare gets snappier, the hats brighter, the kick rounder. That is the real accent range — roughly 12 dB across the kit — not a compressor flattening it to a couple.
New DECAY and RING controls on the hats, toms, congas, claves and maracas. Each one is an extra pot at a named point in the original schematic — the mod a tech would actually solder — and the centre detent is the unmodified machine, bit for bit. Two catalogued mods were built, measured, and refused because they did not do what their label promised.
Pitch works on every circuit voice the way it works on the bench: by changing the capacitors in the model. Time constants, oscillator periods and filter corners all scale together, so a pitched hat roll behaves like real hardware being retuned rather than a sample being sped up. Fine Pitch adds 0.1‑semitone steps for tuning a kit into a track.
Every voice is checked against recordings of real hardware, band by band and window by window, with the onsets included — the comparison that hides nothing. Where the model still differs, the difference is written down rather than dialled out: no corrective EQ exists anywhere in the kit, because a filter that does not trace to a drawn part is not allowed to ship.
Levels come from the printed output voltages in Roland’s own adjustment tables, then the kit is padded to sit at the same loudness as the leading 808 emulations — measured against them, not guessed. The balance between voices is the machine’s own mix‑bus resistor network.
The 606 got this treatment in 4.5.0. The 909 is next.
Inside BeatForge
Everything in the box
Full 606, 808 and 909 kits circuit-modeled — kicks, snares, hats, toms, claps, cymbals, congas, claves — the 808 rebuilt component by component from the service schematics (all sixteen voices, see how) and the 606 derived the same way, both verified against hardware recordings — plus Vintage DCO, Hoover, Reese Bass, Supersaw, FM Kick, and Karplus Snare. All synthesized, no samples. Put the open and closed hats on two tracks and they choke each other automatically, like the hardware.
A circuit-modeled 1176 on every track and on the master bus — the JFET gain cell solved as an equation, the diode-bridge detector with its real timing network, and a transformer output stage. Click the COMP slot on a mixer strip and the whole compressor opens in its own window: A/B compare, copy and paste settings, ratios 4:1 through 20:1 and all buttons in. The knob calibration is measured, not guessed. It is also free on its own — download FetComp for VST3 and AU.
A Koren-modeled 12AX7 valve stage with asymmetric saturation and natural second-harmonic warmth, plus Soft, Hard, Foldback, and Hardcore modes. Hardware-accurate lo-fi with zero-order hold and noise-shaped bitcrushing in three characters: Arcade, Vintage Sampler, Crunch.
Parameter locks on anything — pitch, filter, distortion, bit depth, synth macros. Shift-select steps, move a knob, done. Press LANE and draw locks as bars under the grid instead. And with 32 Edit Groups per track, one kick track carries dozens of different kicks — whole fills, ghost notes, and accent layers in a single row.
A dedicated 808-style accent row that carries into MIDI export, per-track speed from 1/4× to 4× with triplet ratios, independent track lengths for polymeters, hit probability and sub-steps, and a GEN tab for Euclidean and seeded-random fills with a live preview knob.
16 pattern slots with seamless quantized switching, a chain lane that plays the whole arrangement, and MIDI export of the complete song. Arm REC and drum beats in live — MIDI controller, keys, or MPC-style Pads — with overdub and automatic accents on hard hits.
AI-powered BPM detection (Beat This!), native REX plus a built-in slicer for WAV/AIFF/FLAC/MP3/OGG. Tag steps or slices into colored link groups and edit them as one, then route any slice or group to its own plugin output for separate processing in your DAW.
An Elektron-style delay on every track — tempo-synced times, ping-pong, and filtering inside the feedback loop, fully lockable per step. Plus a five-band drum-tuned Sculptor EQ (Sub, Thump, Clean, Crack, Air) with a tube exciter on the high band.
10 LFOs with a node-based shape editor — draw your own curves, tension per segment — and 5-stage AHDSR envelopes with adjustable curve tension. MIDI Learn on every control, native Launch Control XL with LED feedback, per-track MIDI I/O, and drag-out MIDI export.
REX Engine · Official Reason Studios SDK
If you built a loop library in the ReCycle era, it deserves better than time-stretching. Sliced loops follow tempo with full transients and zero artifacts — and BeatForge reads .rx2 natively in Ableton Live, Logic, FL Studio, Cubase, Studio One, Reaper and Bitwig, including the hosts that dropped REX support years ago.
Pitch, filter, envelope and FX per individual slice — and the locks hold when you trigger from your DAW over MIDI.
Send the kick slices to one output and the ghost hits to another, then remix a twenty-year-old loop with fresh processing.
Random slice mode re-rolls on every hit, mute slices in place, or drag the slice MIDI out and drive it from your own piano roll.
REX files load read-only — your originals stay untouched. The built-in slicer does the same for WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3 and OGG.
Free from PulSonix
Some of what gets built for BeatForge is worth having on its own, so it goes out free — no email, no account, no trial timer. Just a download.
A circuit-modelled 1176: the JFET gain cell solved as an equation, the diode-bridge detector with its real timing network, and a transformer output stage. Ratios 4:1 to 20:1 and all buttons in. The same compressor sits on every channel inside BeatForge. VST3 and AU for macOS, VST3 for Windows, both signed.
The compressor's actual signal path is on GitHub under MIT, with the derivation and an honest list of every approximation it makes and why. Useful if you build plugins, or if you just want to see whether the modelling claims hold up.
Things that start as a part of BeatForge and end up standing on their own keep landing here. Nothing to sign up for — check back, or follow along on GitHub.
All of it is free and stays free. If it earns a place in your work and you want to chip in, you can buy me a coffee — entirely optional, and it goes straight back into build time.
Download
Every feature unlocked, no card, no obligation. Install it, click “Start Trial”, and use it on real work before you decide.
€39 one-time · perpetual licence · free updates
Buy BeatForgeQuestions before you buy? Mail beatforgehelp@gmail.com — you get the developer, not a ticket queue.
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