Documentation · v5.0.4
Everything from first launch to per-step parameter locks. Each section expands — or use Cmd/Ctrl + F to search the whole page.
BeatForge comes as a Standalone App and as VST3, AU (Mac only), AAX and CLAP plugins. The installer puts every part where your DAW looks for it.
.dmg. It holds one file, Install BeatForge.pkg: double-click it and follow the steps. On the list of parts, untick anything you don’t want: Standalone App (goes into your Applications folder), VST3 Plug-In, Audio Unit Plug-In (Logic Pro, GarageBand), AAX Plug-In (Pro Tools) and CLAP Plug-In. All of them start ticked, and BeatForge’s shared data installs by itself. There is no app to drag to Applications..msi installer and choose what to install: Standalone, VST3, AAX or CLAP. The VST3 goes into C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3, where your DAW looks for it. The Windows standalone app works with ASIO drivers (see Standalone App)./Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3, /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components (AU), /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/CLAP, and for AAX /Library/Application Support/Avid/Audio/Plug-Ins.The first time BeatForge opens, it shows the licence screen: a Start Trial button, a box labelled Enter activation code and an Activate button.
After 14 days the licence screen reads: Trial has expired. Please purchase to continue. Online, press Check Again for an extension; offline, enter an extension code.
Click the BeatForge logo at the top left and choose Licence... to see this computer’s licence:
New to BeatForge, or to drum machines? Start here: your first beat in a minute, how to start and stop it, and how to take a mistake back.
Hearing nothing? The button at the left end of the strip above the steps must read SEQ ON, and the track’s M (mute) must be off. In the standalone app, also check Options > Audio/MIDI Settings...: your audio output must be chosen there, and a buffer of 256 or 512 samples is a safe choice (see Standalone App).
Next, read Tracks and Basic Sequencing.
Switch pages with the Sequencer, Mixer and Slicer buttons in the middle of the top bar:
Also in the top bar: the BeatForge logo on the left (themes, licence and more, see The Logo Menu), and on the right the MASTER level and the MIDI button for your MIDI mappings. The song box and the File button sit above the track list.
The bar along the bottom edge shows and hides parts of the Sequencer page:
Two small icons beside a sample’s waveform, Grid and Snap (the magnet), show the beat grid over the waveform and make the edges you drag there snap to it.
BeatForge remembers the window size, the open docks, the page and tab you were on, and Grid and Snap, for every project and every new instance. They belong to BeatForge, not to the song.
Every track has one sound box next to its name. On an empty track it reads Load Sound... — click it and choose what the track plays:
Try this: let the pattern play on an Eight-O Kick track and click > a few times — you hear the next Eight-O voices one by one.
BeatForge uses the Beat This! AI model to find a sample’s tempo as soon as you load it.
The song box above the track list, next to the File button, also loads whole kits. (While no song is open it reads Load Song, or Load Song... when BeatForge’s own songs folder holds songs.) Its LOAD KIT part holds:
The SONG part of the same box lists the songs in the open song’s folder (with no song open, BeatForge’s own songs folder).
Try this: choose LOAD KIT > Nine-O Kit, then Import MIDI Groove... with a General MIDI drum loop from your DAW’s library, and press play.
Create evolving patterns using Edit Groups, P-Locks, and probability.
Each row is one track: one sound with its own steps. A song holds up to 64 tracks.
Right-Click a track’s name for the track menu:
Right-Click a step for the step menu:
A flam turns one step into a drummer’s stroke: soft grace notes just before the hit, or quick extra hits just after it. The step’s own hit, the main hit, stays where the step plays it: on the grid, or where SWING and NUDGE put it. Grace notes come before it, so the beat itself never moves. Flams work on every track, drum voices and samples alike. There are four:
The Flams tab of the knob panel shapes them. Each knob’s centre is natural: the right setting for whichever flam the step has.
Try this: on an Eight-O Snare track, switch on steps 5 and 13, then Cmd + Option + Click step 13 once (Ctrl + Alt + Click on Windows): one dot appears left of its light. Press play, open the Flams tab and turn SPACING left for a tight flam, right for a loose one.
The strip above the bar-number ruler holds, from left to right:
The bar-number ruler under it:
The Time tab has three knobs:
An accent makes a hit stronger. There are two kinds; either one accents the hit, and both together are no stronger than one:
How much stronger an accent is depends on the voice — see the next section.
One fader sets how strong every accent is: the ACCENT fader on the Mixer page, in the master section next to MASTER. It reads from +0.0 dB to +12.0 dB; the default is +6.0 dB. What it does depends on the voice:
Each track has 32 Edit Groups: 32 independent settings of the track’s sound, assigned per step. Every knob position is stored separately per group — volume and pan, pitch, the envelope and its ANALOG switch, distortion and its mode, lo-fi, filter and EQ, nudge, delay and reverb, the Flams tab, the engine’s own knobs, the Donk voice and the Kitchen Sink panel. The engine itself is the same in all 32 groups: picking a sound sets it for the whole track, and it can’t be locked per step. Use groups for true per-step sound design within a single track:
See every edit group of a track at once, each on its own row under the step row — made for REX and sliced loops, where the kicks, snares, hats and ghost notes are all groups of one track. (Not to be confused with the Lane, which draws parameter locks.)
Automate any knob per-step without complex menus:
The lane is a graphical way to draw the same parameter locks — bars under the step grid instead of shift-selecting steps and turning knobs. It reads and writes the exact same lock data, so anything you draw in the lane shows up on the knobs and vice versa. It always edits the selected track.
“How do I give one step a different pitch?” There are four ways, and each does a different job:
A lock or group pitch and a pitch-pattern cell add up: a +5 lock on a step that plays a +7 cell sounds 12 semitones up.
Which one? A one-off pitch on one step: a lock. A sound variant that comes back, like a higher tom in every fill: a group. Melodic runs and bass lines: a pitch pattern, or MIDI from your DAW.
Every song holds 32 pattern slots. A slot stores the sequence: steps, rolls, flams, chances, accents (the ACCENT row too), edit-group and link-group assignments, parameter locks, the bar layout and repeats, each track’s own row length and the time signature. It never stores your sounds or the tracks’ pitch patterns, so switching patterns can’t cut ringing tails or change the kit.
Turn on TRIG, next to SONG in the Patterns panel, and MIDI notes outside the playable keyboard range launch pattern slots — from a DAW clip or a controller:
Try this: make patterns in slots 1 and 2, then put two notes in a DAW clip on BeatForge’s track: note 0 at bar 1 and note 1 at bar 5. Press play: pattern 1 starts with the first note, and pattern 2 takes over when pattern 1 next comes to its end after the second note.
The export buttons sit at the top left of the Sequencer view, above the song box.
.mid file. With SONG on it exports the whole chained song, so the arrangement in your DAW matches playback. Right-click it for MIDI Export Velocities: the Normal step and Accent step values (100 and 127 by default). Every stroke of a flam becomes a note of its own, the soft ones at a lower velocity.Play your beats in live instead of clicking them in — like tapping a hardware drum machine.
Click Keys on the dock bar. The on-screen keyboard plays the selected track, and records into it when REC is armed. The top row holds:
Keytrack and One-Shot belong to the selected track, and show while exactly one track is selected. The second row, just above the keys, holds the pitch patterns.
A pitch pattern is a row of 16 pitch offsets that a track steps through, one per hit — it turns a one-note bass or a tom into a riff without a single lock. Each track has 32 of them. Open the Keys dock and select one track; the row just above the keys holds:
A pitch pattern only plays from a bar that carries a marker. Markers belong to the selected track:
Try this: on an Eight-O Low Tom track (pick it in the track’s sound box, under Eight-O), click steps 1, 4, 7, 11 and 13. Set the first five cells to 0, +3, +5, +7 and +10, then Option/Alt + Click the fifth cell so the pattern is five cells long. Right-click bar 1 on the ruler > Patterns 1-8 > Start Pattern 1 and press play: the tom plays a little riff, the same in every bar.
The Gen tab writes patterns for you — as a starting point or a finished groove. It works on the current bar, or on the whole row when the track has its own length.
Everything the Gen tab writes is a normal pattern afterwards — edit steps, add parameter locks, assign edit groups as usual. And if you don’t like a result: each Gen action is one undo step, so Cmd/Ctrl + Z takes it back.
BeatForge has 34 circuit-modelled drum voices in three kits — Eight-O (16), Nine-O (11) and Six-O (7) — plus Kitchen Sink, Donk, Ghost Choir, Dark Star, Vintage DCO, Hoover, Reese Bass, Supersaw, FM Kick and Karplus Snare, and the older voices under Legacy. Pick any of them in a track’s sound box.
The circuit voices’ knobs follow the same rules on all three kits:
The full 808, rebuilt from its circuit: Kick, Snare, Closed Hat, Open Hat, Cymbal, Cowbell, Clap, Low/Mid/Hi Tom, Low/Mid/Hi Conga, Rimshot, Claves and Maracas. The knobs on the Synth tab, left to right:
Try this: on a slow kick pattern, turn the kick’s DECAY fully up, then bring BOOM up from the centre — the long 808 boom, without the drone the real mod can fall into.
The full 909, rebuilt from its circuit: Kick, Snare, Rimshot, Clap, Low/Mid/Hi Tom, Closed Hat, Open Hat, Crash and Ride. The knobs, left to right:
The third circuit kit, modelled on the TR-606: Six-O Kick, Snare, Low Tom, Hi Tom, Closed Hat, Open Hat and Cymbal. Load all seven with LOAD KIT > Six-O Kit in the song box, or pick single voices under Six-O in a track’s sound box.
The real 606 has only a level knob per voice, so DECAY, TONE, SNAPPY, BOOM/PUNCH, SWEEP and BRIGHT here are modifications — at their centre you hear the stock machine. The knobs, left to right:
Try this: load the Six-O Kit and turn the snare’s SNAPPY fully right, then fully left — from a wiry rattle to almost bare drum.
5.0.4 changes four Six-O voices. The kick and both hi-hats get new knobs (BOOM/PUNCH on the kick; DECAY, SWEEP and BRIGHT on the hats), and the kick’s TONE and the snare’s TONE and PITCH work differently. Each change is a modification people solder into a real 606, published by Mungo Enterprises (the bass drum, snare and hi-hat pages) and by Geoff Waterston (“The Mix 06”, the hi-hat sweep). BeatForge models the 606 with that part fitted. Every mod knob’s centre is the stock 606 — exactly the 5.0.3 sound — and Cmd + Click (Mac) or Ctrl + Click (Windows) puts a knob back there. The toms and the cymbal are unchanged.
Try this: on the Six-O kick, set DECAY to about three quarters, turn BOOM/PUNCH a little to the left and pull the track’s VOLUME down — then try PUNCH on the right for a tighter, harder kick.
Right-click a track’s name > Voice Mode. The item is there for the circuit drum voices of all three kits (the Six-O Legacy voices too) and for Kitchen Sink.
When a kit voice was rebuilt as a circuit model, the older voice moved to Legacy > Eight-O (Legacy), Nine-O (Legacy) or Six-O (Legacy) in the sound box, with “(Legacy)” after its name. Songs that use these voices keep playing them, unchanged. Each Legacy voice has its own knobs — hover over them to see what they do.
Under Synths in the sound box (Donk and Kitchen Sink have their own sections below):
Under Specials:
A four-operator FM synth whose default voice is a donk — the bouncy, woody FM bass of donk and bounce. Since 5.0.2 Donk runs like Yamaha’s YM2414, the chip in the TX81Z, down to the chip’s own operator timing, LFO and noise. Songs you saved earlier keep their voices. Pick Synths > Donk; a new Donk track starts on Donk Bright.
Try this: on a Donk bass line, step through the nine donks with < >, then bring DRIVE up past the centre for a dirtier bounce.
A drum synth modelled on the 1979 Pearl Syncussion SY-1: falling toms, laser zaps, robot blips and noise snares. Pick Synths > Kitchen Sink; each track is one channel of the machine.
Try this: load the Laser Zap preset and move SWEEP RANGE and SWEEP SPEED while the pattern plays.
The Synth tab shows up to four knobs, named for the engine the track plays — and only the knobs that engine has. There are no fixed macro names: an Eight-O Cowbell shows none, Donk shows DRIVE, Kitchen Sink shows DECAY and TUNE, and empty slots close up. Hover over a knob for its tooltip. Where the engine can glide, a GLIDE switch sits next to the knobs. Like the other knobs, they can be locked per step.
The four knobs keep their positions when you change engine, so a knob you moved on one engine starts out moved on the next: Cmd/Ctrl + Click puts it back to its centre. The Six-O mod knobs are the one exception (see Switching engines). The knobs of every drum voice are listed under 808 Kit, 909 Kit and 606 Kit above.
BeatForge features two distinct slicing engines depending on your file type.
A REX file (.rx2, .rex, .rcy) arrives already sliced — the slice markers come from ReCycle, Reason Studios’ slicing tool. To the right of the waveform strip above the steps, one tall switch reads SLC or SEQ (its letters stacked). It sets how the track plays the loop:
Try this: drop a REX loop on a track, switch it to SEQ, turn on step 1 and press play. Change the tempo — the slices follow, with no stretching.
A sample you load shows the same tall switch beside the waveform strip, reading SLC but unlit. Press it and BeatForge slices the sample at its hits and switches the track to SLC, so each step can play one slice (see REX Files for how steps choose slices). Cmd/Ctrl + Z takes you back to the plain sample. From then on the switch flips between SLC and SEQ, as for a REX.
Fine-tune the slices on the Slicer page (the Slicer button at the top):
High-quality time-stretching and pitch-shifting are powered by Signalsmith Stretch by Geraint Luff / Signalsmith Audio, used under the MIT License.
The FX tab holds, left to right: PITCH, PITCH BEND, BEND RATE, DISTORTION, BIT DEPTH, SAMPLERATE and FX SEND. Distortion and the two lo-fi knobs are described below.
Try this: on a tom, set PITCH BEND to +12 and BEND RATE to about 150 ms for the disco-tom “pew”. A shorter BEND RATE gives a snappier drop.
Good to know: on a few circuit voices (the modelled drum-machine sounds) the pitch is fixed at the moment of the hit. On those, PITCH BEND does nothing, and an LFO on PITCH does not move the pitch while the note sounds: the Eight-O closed hat, open hat, cymbal, clap and maracas, and the Six-O hats and cymbal. On a Mac, open PITCH’s menu with a real right-click (a two-finger click on a trackpad); Control+click shows only the basic knob menu.
Right-click the Distortion knob to select one of 5 algorithms:
The knob drives from 0 to 30 dB, and the whole range works. Past about 15 dB the sound is already well saturated, so turning further changes it less.
Two sliders give you authentic hardware-sampler character:
The EQ tab reads, left to right: HP, SUB, THUMP, CLEAN, CRACK, AIR and LP. The five knobs in the middle are drum-tuned bands targeting specific musical frequencies:
HP / LP: a high-pass and a low-pass filter for extra tone shaping, from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. They are clean filters with no resonance peak, and they sweep smoothly. LP turned fully up is switched off; HP turned fully down rests at 20 Hz, below the deepest kick. Both can be locked per step, drawn in the Lane and moved by an LFO.
The Filter tab is a vowel filter for any track: it shapes the sound the way your mouth shapes “aah” or “ooh”. Use it for talking basses, choir-like tones and vowel sweeps.
All three can be locked per step and drawn in the Lane, and an LFO on VOWEL sweeps the vowel while the note sounds. Try this: on a bass track, set MIX to 100 %, click VOWEL, open the Lane and draw a different vowel on each step.
Every track has its own Elektron-style delay on a dedicated Delay tab. The knobs, left to right:
Try this: leave SEND at -inf, Shift + Click one snare step and turn SEND up: only that hit goes into the echo, a classic dub throw.
The Reverb tab gives every track its own plate reverb. The first three knobs build the room; the last two are a gate that cuts the tail off:
The plate is set per edit group, can be locked per step and drawn in the Lane, and LFOs move it (5.0.1). One plate serves the whole track: each hit that sends to it sets the room and opens the gate for the tail that follows, and dry hits leave it alone. Tails ring out until they are silent, for at most 30 seconds. This plate is separate from the master IR reverb (see IR Reverb Send).
Try this: on a snare, set SEND to -6 dB, DECAY to 72 %, GATE about halfway and RELEASE short: the big gated snare of the 80s.
Precision transient shaping with a 5-stage envelope on the ADSR tab. Its knobs are ATTACK, HOLD, DECAY, SUSTAIN and RELEASE; the times run up to 32 seconds, SUSTAIN from 0 to 100 %.
The ANALOG switch sits to the right of RELEASE. Off, the envelope is the classic AHDSR above, with its curves. On, DECAY and RELEASE behave like the envelope of an analog drum machine: a capacitor discharging into a transistor.
Try this: on an Eight-O Kick track, set SUSTAIN to 0 % and DECAY to about 300 ms, then switch ANALOG on and off while the pattern plays: the body of the kick stays the same, and with ANALOG on a quiet tail rings on after it.
Click Mixer at the top for the console: one channel strip per track, and the master section pinned on the right.
Each strip, top to bottom:
The strip’s fader and pan come after the track’s own VOLUME and PAN knobs: shape the sound on the track, then balance the mix here. The mouse wheel scrolls the console sideways; hold Cmd (Mac) / Ctrl (Windows) to turn a fader or pan with the wheel.
The master section on the right never scrolls. Top to bottom:
Click a slot’s name to open its window. Drag a window by its header and resize it from its bottom-right corner; Esc, the X or a click outside closes it, and BeatForge remembers where you left it.
Good to know: if a song routes tracks to outputs the host does not offer, those tracks play through Main and BeatForge says so (Some outputs aren’t available). Your routing is kept, and it comes back once the outputs are enabled.
Every channel strip and the master carry FetComp, a FET compressor — the same one as the free FetComp plugin. Click COMP to open it; its power button, on the strip or in the window, switches it in.
A track’s compressor sits before its strip’s fader, so moving the fader does not change how hard it compresses. Shift-drag a knob for finer moves, and double-click it to type a value. The compressor has one setting per track: it takes no parameter locks, edit groups or LFOs. Its knob moves, A / B and PASTE are undo steps.
Try this: on the master, open COMP, pick ALL, raise INPUT until GAIN REDUCTION moves a few dB, then bring the level back with OUTPUT.
AMP, the second slot in the master’s INSERTS, runs the whole mix through a Neural Amp Modeler capture (a .nam file): an amp, a pedal or a whole rig, learned from the real thing. Click AMP to open its window.
The slot shows the loaded model’s name. With no model loaded, AMP passes the sound through unchanged. Try this: load a crunchy amp capture and set BLEND to about 30 % for parallel grit on the whole kit.
Every track’s FX SEND knob (FX tab) feeds one shared master effect. Click IR under SENDS to open its window, FX SEND:
Loading an IR switches the send to REVERB and fades the new IR in without a dropout. An IR recorded at another sample rate is converted to your project’s rate, so it keeps its true length and pitch; older songs that used such an IR may sound slightly different now, and they are now correct. On the Mac, the installer also puts mediumroom.wav in /Library/Application Support/BeatForge/reverbIR. Despite its name it is not a room and not the built-in Medium Room: it is a plate reverb with a decay of about 3 seconds, which every earlier installer shipped. It stays so that songs which use it still sound the same. You can load it with LOAD IR like any other file.
Good to know: this reverb is separate from each track’s own plate on the Reverb tab (see Plate Reverb). Try this: on a new song, turn a snare’s FX SEND up to about -12 dB for a touch of room around it.
BeatForge gives you 10 LFOs, each with a fully editable shape and a deep routing system.
Open it with LFOs on the dock bar. The ten LFOs sit on tabs 1 to 10; they belong to the song, so any track can use any of them.
.lfo files.BeatForge has deep MIDI integration designed for hardware-first workflows.
.xml files: Load MIDI Config..., Save, Save As... and Clear All Mappings. Mappings are also saved inside each song and project, and loading a song brings that song’s mappings (or none), so keep your controller setup in a config file and load it when you need it.There is no automatic controller profile: you MIDI-learn the controls you want (see above). BeatForge then lights up the buttons you learned, through its MIDI output:
The standalone app is all of BeatForge without a DAW: it has its own play button, tempo and audio settings. For your first beat, see Quick Start.
1.2k or 1200 Hz, 800 Hz, 50%L or R25 on a pan, 1.5 s or 300 ms, 2x on SPEED, 1/8. or 1/16T on the delay’s TIME. A number without a unit is read in the unit the box showed: 2 over 1.20 kHz gives 2 kHz, and 1.5 over 1.00 s gives 1.5 s, so type the unit when you cross between ms and s or Hz and kHz. A typed value is one undo step, and on the Gen tab it writes the steps, as turning the knob does. Text without a digit cancels and keeps the old value.Keyboard shortcuts (Mac / Windows):
Step, lane and slice gestures are in their own sections (Basic Sequencing, P-Lock Lane Editor, Slicing Audio Files). If your DAW keeps these keys for itself, click inside BeatForge’s window first; in REAPER, turn on Send all keyboard input to plug-in.
Click the BeatForge logo at the top left:
The theme and Multi-core apply to every project and every new instance.
The update bell: when a newer version is out, a small bell appears next to the logo. BeatForge looks at most once a day, and nothing pops up. Click the bell to read what is new, with a Download button. It goes away once you run the new version.
Going back to an older version: keep every computer you share songs with on the same version. A song saved with 5.0.4 or later that uses the built-in Medium Room has a silent reverb send in 5.0.3, which does not have that IR. If an older version saves a newer song, the newer features are dropped: flams, the ANALOG switch and the Six-O mods.
.drsong files. In a DAW your song is also saved inside the DAW project; a .drsong file moves it to another project or to the standalone app.Ableton Live dropped native REX support in Live 11. Load BeatForge as a VST3 instrument, drag your .rx2 file in, and the slices map to the step sequencer with tempo-locked playback — no conversion, no time-stretching.
Not natively in current versions. BeatForge runs as a VST3/AU plugin in all of them and reads .rx2 files directly through the official Reason Studios REX SDK.
Same idea, different host: BeatForge brings Octo Rex-style REX loop playback — slice triggering, sequenced slices, tempo sync — to any VST3/AU DAW, and adds a full drum machine, per-step parameter locks and multi-output slice routing around it.
With ReCycle itself — Reason Studios re-released it in 2025 as a free download, with Apple Silicon and Windows ARM support. Slice your loops in ReCycle, then play them in any DAW with BeatForge: a complete REX workflow where the creation tool costs nothing. BeatForge's own slicer also chops WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3 and OGG directly.
More questions? Email beatforgehelp@gmail.com — you'll get the developer, not a ticket queue.
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BeatForge is built on the work of others, and they deserve the credit:
THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt, which the About box names.