Getting started

This page is the tour: how the window is laid out, what's always on screen, what each page is for, and how to hear your first beat. For designing the sounds, follow Building a kit next.

The window

The whole interface is one window: a two-row header across the top, then the active page. Two things are always on screen: the header at the top and the Macros panel at the bottom, so your transport and your macros are never more than a glance away.

┌ ☰ KIWIPULSE  Basement ‹ › ⤓  ↶ ↷ ··················· status   – □ × ┐
│ BENCH  SAMPLES ································ ▶   BPM   SWING      │
│                                                                      │
│                         ( the active page )                          │
│                                                                      │
│ ┌ MACROS ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ │
│   sample credits                                                     │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The header, top row

• ☰ KIWIPULSE: the menu.
  • Kit: New, Open…, Save, Save As.
  • Edit: Undo, Redo.
  • Kiwipulse: Open project… and Save project…, the whole session as one .project.kiwi file.
  • Help: this manual in your browser, the keyboard shortcuts, and About.
• The kit's name (Basement): click it to open the kit library. A dot after the name means the kit has changed since you loaded or saved it. Programming hits does not set it: the groove is not part of the kit.
• ‹ ›: the kit before or after this one in the library.
• ⤓: save the kit to the library, under a name and tags.
• ↶ ↷: undo / redo.
• The status line: what just happened ("Saved Basement"), or why something failed. A standing problem, such as no audio device, stays there until it is fixed.

The header, second row

• BENCH / SAMPLES: the two pages.
• ▶ Play / Stop: start and stop the audition groove (standalone; in a plugin the host transport drives it too).
• BPM: tempo, 40–240. Drag up or down to change (hold Shift for fine steps), double-click to type. Follows the host when you run as a plugin.
• Swing: shuffle, 50–80%, delaying every other 16th. Drags and types like BPM.

The Macros panel

The kit's four performance macros — drag one to morph many parameters at once. Below it sits a strip of sample credits for whatever acoustic samples the kit uses.

The pages

Switch with BENCH / SAMPLES at the left of the header's second row.

Two pages, and that is the whole app — there is no settings page. Audio device and buffer size belong to your DAW; the standalone simply takes your system's default output. And the sample credits that would otherwise need a home sit on the strip under the macro bar, visible all the time rather than filed away.

The BENCH, top to bottom

• The 16 hits, titled with what you are editing (KICK / BASE, KICK / HIT 13): a strip of the selected track's sixteen steps, each drawn as the little waveform it fires. Click to place or select a hit; the drum you shape below follows your selection.
• ANATOMY — the sound designer for the selected track: a hit meeting a body, or a sample's signal path, then the per-voice room and chain, and the velocity strip. You edit by dragging the drawing. See Machines.
• GROOVE — a contact sheet with one row per track. Click a row to select that track, double-click to solo, alt-click to mute; the + TRACK row at the end adds a voice.

Your first beat

1. On the BENCH, click cells in the 16 hits strip to drop trigs; click again to clear one. Put kicks on the down-beats, a snare on 5 and 13, hats in between.
2. Press Play (or hit play in your host). The playhead sweeps the strip and lit hits fire.
3. Select a track on the groove contact sheet; the drum above now points at it. Shape its sound by dragging the anatomy, or tweak BPM / Swing in the header.
4. Need another voice? + TRACK on the contact sheet adds one — pick its machine from the list.
5. Alt-click a track's row to mute it (its tail rings out); alt-click again to un-mute.
6. Happy with the kit? Save it with ⤓ beside its name, or save the whole session with ☰ › Save project….

Running as a plugin? Your DAW plays the kit through MIDI pads (`C4`+, one per track) and drives the groove off its transport — see [Using Kiwipulse in your DAW](using-in-your-daw.md).

Keyboard shortcuts

In a plugin, Space and the Ctrl keys belong to your DAW. ☰ › Help › Keyboard shortcuts lists them all.

Undo is granular but sensible: each discrete edit gets its own step, while a continuous gesture (dragging a curve, fanning a retrig) collapses into a single undo. Live-performance mutes aren't undoable — they change no saved data.