8-bit studio — chiptune loop maker_
Piano roll
Mixer & instruments
Keyboard shortcuts
Guide — your first 8-bit loop in a minute
Tap a preset like Boss Battle or Chip House, or press G for the generator: choose a genre, key, scale and energy and a full loop drops in.
It plays straight away: drums, triangle bass, chords on the wavetable and a pulse lead, all synthesised live in the page.
Click a cell to add or remove a note, scroll to transpose, right-click for velocity and Shift-click for tracker effects like arpeggio and slide.
Press 1–8 while it plays. The next pattern is queued and switches exactly on the bar, like a live set.
SHARE puts the whole loop in a link. EXPORT renders a seamless WAV for your game, video or DAW.
What is in here
The line-up of a classic handheld and a home console in one: two pulse waves for leads and harmony, a stepped triangle for bass, a wavetable for pads, noise for texture, plus a synthesised drum kit so percussion never steals a melodic channel.
- PU1 · PU2
- Pulse waves, 12.5 / 25 / 50 / 75% duty cycle
- TRI
- NES-style bit-stepped triangle bass
- WAV
- 32-sample wavetable for pads and organs
- NOI
- Noise for hits, sweeps and risers
- DRM
- Kick, snare, hat and clap lanes
Presets are fixed recipes with their own tempo, swing, duty cycles and wavetable, so the same button always loads the same loop. The generator rolls a new seed each time inside the genre, scale and energy you choose.
- Presets
- Arcade Hero · Boss Battle · Overworld Cruise · Title Screen · Dungeon Crawl · Chip House · Neon Chase · Trap Cartridge
- Genres
- Arcade, house, drum & bass, trap, chill
- Scales
- Minor, major, dorian, pentatonic
- AGAIN
- Re-roll a variation of the same style
Chip channels play one note at a time, so trackers fake chords by cycling a note through its chord tones many times a second. Shift-click any note to cycle its effect.
- M · m
- Major and minor chord arpeggio
- /
- Slide into the note
- ~
- Vibrato
- ↓ · ↑
- Pitch zap down or up, for lasers and jumps
- Velocity
- Right-click to cycle how hard a note hits
Eight patterns of 16 or 32 steps. Copy and paste between them, write melodies in the piano roll, and chain patterns into a longer arrangement that exports as one file.
- 1–8
- Select, or queue on the bar while playing
- Chain
- Play patterns in order as a song
- R
- Record notes live from the keyboard
- Piano
- Z–M and Q–U, two octaves
Each channel has its own volume and filter, and everything runs through a tempo-synced echo and a master limiter so loud loops stay clean.
- Duty
- Thin, bright or hollow pulse leads
- Wavetable
- Swap the single-cycle wave
- Echo
- Delay locked to the tempo
- Swing
- From straight 16ths to a lazy shuffle
The echo tail that rings past the last step is wrapped around into the start of the file, so the WAV repeats with no gap and no cut-off echo.
- WAV
- 1 to 16 repeats, pattern or whole chain
- SHARE
- The whole project inside the URL
- SAVE · LOAD
- Project as a small JSON file
- Autosave
- Survives a refresh, undo with Ctrl+Z
A free chiptune maker that runs in your browser
8-Bit Studio is an online 8-bit music maker for making chiptune loops without installing anything. Open the page and you have six retro sound channels, a step sequencer with tracker effects, a piano roll, a loop generator and a mixer. Every sound is synthesised live with the Web Audio API, so there are no samples to load, no plugins and no account. It works on a laptop, a desktop and on a phone or tablet.
It is built for loops first: game music, a background track for a video or stream, a jingle, or an idea you want to take into a DAW. Start from a style preset or the generator, change what you want, and export a WAV that repeats without a click.
How to make 8-bit music
Chiptune is music made with, or in the style of, the sound chips in old consoles and home computers. Those chips had only a few channels and each could play one note at a time, so the style comes from working around that limit. The typical parts are:
- A pulse-wave lead — the bright, buzzy melody. Changing the duty cycle changes its colour: 50% sounds full and hollow, 25% thinner and brighter, 12.5% sharp and nasal.
- A triangle bass — round and soft, with the slightly stepped edge of the NES triangle.
- Arpeggios instead of chords — one channel flicks through the notes of a chord so fast your ear hears a shimmering chord.
- Noise drums — short bursts of noise for snares and hats, with pitch drops for kicks.
- Fast tempos and short patterns — 16 or 32 steps repeated and varied, like a level theme.
In 8-Bit Studio all of those are one click away: pulse channels with selectable duty, a triangle channel, arpeggio effects on any note, a synthesised drum kit and patterns that loop.
Game Boy or NES sound?
A mix of both. The two pulse channels and the noise channel follow the character of the Game Boy sound chip, the stepped triangle bass comes from the NES 2A03, and the wavetable channel is modelled on the Game Boy's programmable wave channel. The drum kit is a modern addition so a loop can groove without giving up a melodic channel for percussion.
Music for games and videos, royalty-free
What you make here is your own work. Export the WAV and use it in your games, videos, streams or releases, commercial or not. Because the seamless loop export wraps the echo tail back into the start, the file loops cleanly in Unity, Godot, GameMaker, video editors and DAWs. You can export one pattern or the whole chain, repeated up to sixteen times.
Share a loop as a link
SHARE compresses the whole project — every note, effect, instrument setting and mixer value — into the part of the link after the #. Nothing is uploaded and there is no server: whoever opens the link gets your loop loaded and ready to remix. Bookmarked links double as versions of your own work.
Nothing leaves your device
The studio autosaves to your browser's local storage, so a refresh does not lose your loop. SAVE downloads the project as a small JSON file you can back up and LOAD later. Once the page has loaded it keeps working offline.
Keyboard shortcuts
Space play and stop · F fullscreen · 1–8 select or queue a pattern · Z–M and Q–U play notes on the selected channel · R record · G generator · Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y undo and redo. On the grid: click toggles a note, the mouse wheel transposes, Shift-click cycles effects and right-click cycles velocity.
More music tools
Feed your exports into the music visualizer, trim them in the audio editor, play them in the MP3 player or the retro Winamp player, and draw matching cover art in the pixel art editor. For chords, try the chord pad with drums or the chord chart generator. For a full drum kit under your chiptune, program it in the online drum machine Drum Loop Studio, which also has an 8-bit kit that matches this sound.