Drill Toolkit
The sliding 808 is the signature, so you get the slides pre-built: a fourth and a fifth, both rising into an F, long enough to hear as movement rather than as a soft attack. The fourth pad is the high D# a drill bassline answers with. Add a tight snare-and-clap pair, two rim tones and rolling 808 hats and you have the whole 144 BPM toolkit.
Play the pads below (keyboard works too), hit Play to hear the kit's signature groove, or open the Sequencer tab and program your own beat — then share it as a link or take the WAVs with you. Every sound is produced in-house, nothing resampled, nothing to clear.
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SFZ mapping
Universal sampler format — loads in Sforzando, TAL-Sampler, Bitwig, Reaper and most samplers. Pads mapped from C1 up.
DownloadDecentSampler preset
For the free DecentSampler plugin (VST3/AU) — open the preset and the whole kit is playable instantly.
DownloadMIDI groove
The kit's 4-bar signature pattern (144 BPM, with fill) as a MIDI file — drag it into your DAW on the mapped kit and it plays.
DownloadThree cities, one bassline
Drill has moved twice and mutated both times. It started in Chicago around 2011–12 — Young Chop's stark, menacing beats for Chief Keef — as a slower, colder strain of trap. London took the blueprint and re-engineered it: faster tempos, skippier drum programming, and above all the sliding 808 bassline that has defined UK drill since the mid-2010s. New York then folded the UK sound back into American rap through Pop Smoke and the Brooklyn wave.
Modern drill drums are a study in displacement. The tempo sits around 138–146 BPM in half-time; the snare avoids the obvious backbeat, landing in skippy, off-kilter spots; hats stutter in triplet rolls; and the 808 glides between notes instead of stepping, tying the whole beat to the bassline's movement.
This toolkit is built around that bassline: an 808 in F with pre-rendered slides from the 4th and the 5th, so the glides land in key without any portamento setup, plus the high D# the bassline answers with. Around it: a tight kick and a sub kick, snare and clap tuned to cut, two rim tones for the skippy ghost notes, three hat lengths plus a roll, and a dark perc and cymbal to top it off.
Drill Toolkit — questions
What BPM is drill?
UK and NY drill typically run 138–146 BPM with a half-time feel — this kit suggests 144. Chicago drill, the origin point, sat a little slower and straighter.
How do sliding 808s work?
The bass glides continuously between pitches instead of jumping. Producers usually set up portamento on an 808 synth patch — or use pre-rendered slides like the 2nd, 4th and 5th intervals in this kit, which you can drop in wherever the bassline moves.
Where do I put the snare in a drill beat?
Not on the plain backbeat. Drill snares skip: a common starting point is landing on the 3 and then displacing hits around it with rims as ghost notes. Program the hats in triplet bursts against a straight grid and the signature stumble appears.