How to Make Your 808 Hit Hard (Without Muddying the Mix)

An 808 that shakes your headphones and disappears on a phone speaker is the most common problem I hear in beats producers send me. The artist plays your beat on their phone first. If the low end isn't there, the beat sounds unfinished, and an unfinished beat doesn't get bought.

Here are the seven fixes, in the order I'd try them.

1. Tune the 808 to the key of the beat

An 808 has a pitch. If it sits a semitone off the root of your melody, the low end fights the chords and the whole beat sounds muddy, even when the 808 is loud. Find the root note of your progression and play the 808 on it.

Repitching one sample across the keyboard changes its length and its tone, so the 808 sounds different on every note. That's why Deep End 808s has every character rendered in all twelve keys: you drag in the one labelled with your root and it already sits on the note.

2. Shorten the kick so the 808 owns the low end

Two long sounds in the same frequency range cancel each other out. In modern trap the kick is short and punchy and the 808 carries the sub. If your kick has a long tail, cut it, or duck the 808 for a few milliseconds every time the kick hits. The kicks in Pressure Point are cut short on purpose so the 808 has room.

3. Add harmonics so small speakers can hear it

The fundamental of a low 808 sits around 30 to 60 Hz. Phone and laptop speakers barely reproduce that range. What they do reproduce is the harmonics above it. Run the 808 through saturation or soft distortion and you add energy in the 100 to 300 Hz range, which a phone can play. Your ear fills in the missing fundamental.

Go too far and the 808 turns into a buzz that eats the vocal. Blend the distortion in parallel and stop when the 808 is audible on the phone.

4. Keep everything below 120 Hz in mono

A wide 808 sounds big in headphones and falls apart on a club system or a mono phone speaker. Collapse the low end to mono. Stereo width belongs on the hats, the melody and the effects.

5. Control the tail

An 808 that rings into the next kick turns the low end into a smear. Set the note length to end before the next hit, or automate the release. Check that the sample fades to true zero: a tail that ends on a non-zero value clicks every time it cuts off.

6. Leave headroom instead of clipping the master

Clipping the master to get loudness flattens the 808 into the kick. Mix with headroom, then compare your beat against a commercial reference track at the same volume. If yours sounds smaller, the fix is usually in steps 1 to 4, not in more limiting.

7. Check it on a phone before you send it

Bounce the beat, send it to your own phone and play it through the speaker. That's the test every artist will run without telling you. If the 808 disappears, go back to step 3.

Where to start

If you want tuned 808s to practise on, the free drum kits come with 808s labelled by note. When you're ready for more characters, browse the drum kits. And once your beats hit the way they should, the courses cover the other half: pricing them and getting them in front of artists who pay.