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Auditioning your kit

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Kiwipulse manual

Auditioning your kit

Kiwipulse designs sounds; your DAW plays the beat. But while you're designing, you need to hear the kit against something — so the BENCH carries a small 16-step groove of its own. This page is that groove: dropping hits, shaping how each one lands, and the per-track controls that bend the feel. It is a sketchpad, not a song — for the real beat, see Using Kiwipulse in your DAW.

The per-hit sound design that rides on top of these hits — p-locks and breathe — is Per-hit sound design.

The 16 hits

At the top of the Bench is a strip of the selected track's sixteen steps, each drawn as the little waveform it fires. The playhead sweeps left to right; lit cells sound as it passes.

  • Add / remove a hit — click an empty cell to place a trig, right-click a lit one to clear it.
  • Select a hit — click it. Nothing is modal: selecting just points the next edit at this hit (its p-lock) instead of the sound's base. The drum below and the header follow your selection. Click it again to go back to editing the base.
  • What the badges mean — a small P marks a hit carrying p-locks, a ~ marks one that breathes (re-rolls every pass). The waveform already shows that a hit differs; the badge says why.

Micro-timing

Drag a cell sideways to nudge its hit earlier or later — up to half a step, the human "push/drag" of one note. You're not setting a number called microTiming -12; you're moving the hit to where it sits in its cell, and that is the groove. (Right-click → type for an exact value.)

Retrig (rolls)

A hit can retrigger — strike the same drum several times inside its own step, for a roll, a flam or a stutter. You author it on the hit itself: a burst draws as a row of strikes along the floor of its cell, spaced the way they play and stepped in height by the ramp.

  • Fan the count — alt-drag a cell sideways. The strikes multiply as you pull; drag back to nothing for a single hit. (There is no "1": one strike is a single hit.)
  • Shape the ramp — drag a cell up or down. Up swells into the last strike, down decays from the first. The strike heights are the levels you'll hear.
  • Set the rate — a small pill in the cell's top-right names the division (1/4 down to 1/64, triplets included). Click to step forward, right-click to step back. It shows on the cell you've selected or are hovering, so it never clutters the strip.

Whichever direction you drag first owns the gesture, so a sideways drag still nudges micro-timing and a vertical one always means the ramp. A burst can run past the end of its own cell — the strikes clip at the cell edge and a small > marks the seam, rather than squeezing the row to show a rate that isn't playing.

Rate & length — polymeter

Each track has its own step rate and loop length, and that is the one sequencing trick a DAW can't easily give you inside one instrument:

  • Rate — the pill in the hit strip's subject header names this track's grid subdivision (1/8 … 1/32T). Click it to cycle. Because it's per track, two tracks at different rates drift against each other.
  • Length — drag the loop boundary in the strip to set how many of the 16 steps this track loops over. A track that loops over 12 while another loops over 16 is polymeter — the cheapest route to an evolving groove.

The groove contact sheet

Below the drum sits one row per track — the whole rack at a glance.

  • Select a track — click its row; everything above points at it.
  • Solo — double-click a row to solo that track; double-click again to release.
  • Mute — alt-click a row. New trigs stop, but ringing tails finish naturally; alt-click again to un-mute.
  • Track menu — right-click a row for its actions: remove track, duplicate track, choke group, and (for a slice-mode sample track) fill slices across trigs.
  • Add a track — the dashed + TRACK row at the end opens the machine picker.

Choke

Tracks can belong to a choke group so a new hit cuts off a ringing one — the classic closed-hat-silences-open-hat behaviour.

Set it from the track's right-click menu → Choke group → None or 1–8. Tracks sharing a number cut each other's tails and behave as one voice; the row shows a small G badge so a group reads at a glance. It's saved in the kit — the factory hat kits are already wired this way, so loading one gives you the pedal-choke for free.

Choke groups are also what makes a variant hit behave as one drum: Duplicate track copies a track and auto-groups the copy with its source, so a kick and its accented twin — or any per-hit variation you play on a second note — never ring over each other. See Per-hit sound design.

Copy, paste & undo

Ctrl/Cmd + C / V copy and paste the current selection; Delete clears it. The scope follows what's selected — a single hit or a whole track. Every edit is undoable (Ctrl/Cmd + Z).