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 slim header across the top (undo / redo and the window controls live here), then a warm, framed content area. Two things are always on screen — the header at the top and the macro bar pinned to the bottom — so your transport and your macros are never more than a glance away.

┌ header ···· BENCH  SAMPLES ··················· ▶  BPM  Swing   Kits  Proj  ↶ ↷  – □ × ┐
│                                                                                       │
│                                                                                       │
│                              ( the active page )                                      │
│                                                                                       │
│ ┌ macro bar ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │
│ └───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── sample credits ─┘ │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The header

• BENCH / SAMPLES — the two page tabs.
• ▶ Play / Stop — start and stop the audition groove (standalone; in a plugin the host transport drives it too).
• BPM — tempo, 40–240. Drag to change, double-click to type. Follows the host when you run as a plugin.
• Swing — shuffle, 50–80%, delaying every other 16th.
• Kits — the kit library: save / load / tag / new kit.
• Project — open or save the whole session (.kpp), or load a bundled demo.
• ↶ ↷ — undo / redo.

The macro bar

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

The pages

Switch with the two tabs in the header.

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 — 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.
• The drum — the sound designer for the selected track: its anatomy (a hit meeting a body, or a sample's signal path), the per-voice room and chain, and the velocity strip. You edit by dragging the drawing. See Machines.
• The 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 ▶ (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 from Kits, or save the whole session from 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

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.