Presets & kits

**New here?** For a hands-on, step-by-step walkthrough that builds a full drum rack from scratch and explains every parameter choice, see [Building a kit — a beginner's walkthrough](../guides/building-a-kit.md). This page is the reference for the preset/kit *system* itself.

Kiwipulse has three layers of "starting points", from the smallest tweak to a whole drum rack:

1. Card presets — a quick menu on each Bench card that sets just that card's parameters.
2. Whole-sound presets — a complete named sound for the current machine.
3. Kits — a whole rack of sounds (every track) saved to a library you can browse, tag and load, or start fresh from a clean default.

The first two live on the Bench; kits live in the header, where the current kit's name sits beside the menu.

Card presets

Every card on the Bench carries a small ▾ menu in its corner. Picking an entry sets only the parameters that card owns — so you learn what a card does by watching just its values change, and you can audition shapes without disturbing the rest of the sound.

• Anatomy menus — the HIT and BODY half libraries offer named, pre-dialled halves tailored to the current type: a 909 tick beater, a Gong body, a Reese wavetable scan. Pick one and only that half changes, leaving the other alone. (These are the same libraries the < > arrows step through — see Drum.)
• Shared chain menus — the per-voice chain cards (filter, transient, drive, room…) that every machine has, so their preset lists are the same whatever machine is loaded (e.g. filter → "LP sweep / HP thin / BP focus"; drive → "Clean / Warm / Crush / Fold").

A card preset is purely additive to your current patch: it touches its own params and leaves everything else exactly as you had it.

Whole-sound presets

A whole-sound preset is a complete, named sound for the current machine — the manual's design recipes made one-click. Unlike a card preset it spans every relevant parameter (and often a little chain character too): a Drum's "808 sub", a "Nylon pluck" (a string body), a "Reese bass" (a wavetable body), a Sample's "Lo-fi chop".

Applying one resets the sound to the machine's defaults first, then overlays the preset, so the result is identical every time regardless of what you had dialled in before — a clean, reproducible starting point rather than a partial tweak. From there, shape it by dragging the picture, p-locks and the voice chain.

Every machine ships a handful; switch machine and the list changes to match. See Machines for what each machine's sounds are built from.

Kits

A kit is the whole rack: the sound on every track, the performance macros, and the per-voice configuration — everything that makes the drums sound the way they do. It does not include the groove (the hits, their timing and p-locks), so loading a kit re-skins your beat without touching the groove you've programmed.

The header shows the current kit's name. A dot after it means the kit has changed since you loaded or saved it; hits and p-locks are the groove, not the kit, so programming them does not set it. Loading, stepping and starting a new kit are all undoable, so none of them asks before replacing a changed kit.

Browse & load

Click the kit's name (or ☰ › Kit › Open…, Ctrl+O) to open the KIT LIBRARY:

• A scrollable list of saved kits, each showing its name, tags and author.
• The filter box at the top matches by name, author or tag (case-insensitive), so a large library stays navigable — type acid, #techno, a name, anything.
• Kiwipulse ships factory kits to start from, including two acoustic racks — Modern Acoustic and 70s Rock — built from real multi-velocity drum samples (a harder hit plays a brighter recording, not just a louder one). The acoustic samples are always in your SAMPLES pool, so you can build your own acoustic racks too. Their source and licence are in Credits.
• Click a row to apply that kit and close the library. Your groove stays; only the sounds change.
• The current kit's row starts selected. Delete removes that kit's file from the library. Built-in kits cannot be deleted.
• Folder… points the library at another folder, for kits you keep elsewhere.

‹ › beside the name load the kit before or after this one in the library, so you can step through kits while the groove plays.

Save the current kit

⤓ beside the name (or ☰ › Kit › Save, Ctrl+S) opens the save box:

• Enter a name and optional tags (comma-separated), then Save. The kit (sounds, macros and voice config, with the groove stripped) is written to the library as a single file, and the status line says so.
• Tags are how the filter and browsing stay useful as the library grows; tag by genre, drum style, project, whatever helps you find it later.

New kit

☰ › Kit › New resets the rack to a clean default — every track becomes a fresh default drum voice with a neutral mix, and the kit's name, tags and macros reset. Like loading, it keeps your groove and the track count, so the beat plays on untouched while you design each voice from scratch. It's the "start over" that the library has no file for.

Kits are stored as individual files in your kit-library folder, so they travel with you and can be shared. A kit file is a .kit.kiwi, the preset format every Kiwisonic product reads. Kits saved by older versions as .kpk still show up in the list and load as before. A kit file holds no audio: a sound that plays a recorded sample plays whatever sits in that sample slot of the project you load it into.

Which one do I want?