The 16-step drum machine grid represents two bars of 4/4 time as sixteen eighth notes

The basic unit of dance music programming is a sequence of sixteen eighth notes: two measures of 4/4 time. Drum machines like the Roland TR-808 represent this as a 16-slot ‘ice cube tray’ with one row per percussion sound. Slots are numbered 1-16 and the loop cycles left-to-right, returning to slot 1 after slot 16. This grid is the shared interface for drum machines, DAW step sequencers, and live-coding environments — knowing how beats translate from musical notation (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + / 1 + 2 + …) to slot numbers (01-16) is the foundational skill for all beat programming.

Examples

Reading the row as ‘1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + / 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 +’: slot 1 = beat 1 of bar 1, slot 3 = beat 2, slot 5 = beat 3, slot 9 = beat 1 of bar 2. A four-on-the-floor kick lands on slots 1/5/9/13 (each measure’s beats 1 and 3). In Strudel a 16-step feel maps to s(‘bd*4’) for that kick.

Assessment

Using Hein’s two-measure count, convert to slot numbers: ‘kick on beat 1 of each measure, snare on beat 3 of each measure, hi-hat on every eighth note.’ Then invert: given kick at slots [1,9] and snare at [5,13], describe the pattern in beats.