Building a kit — a beginner's walkthrough

This guide builds a complete drum rack from scratch, one track at a time, and explains every choice — which hit, which body, and why you drag where you do. By the end you'll have a club-ready five-piece kit (kick, snare, closed hat, open hat, clap) and, more importantly, the habit of reading a drum as its anatomy instead of guessing at knobs.

If you only want the vocabulary first (kit vs. sound vs. preset), skim Presets & kits — but you don't have to; the terms are introduced as we go. For the full reference on every hit and body, keep Drum open alongside this.

The one idea to hold on to

**A drum is something hitting something that rings.** You build one by picking a **hit** (what strikes) and a **body** (what rings), then editing them by dragging the picture of the sound. A kit is one such sound per track. The kit does NOT include the beat you play.

That last sentence is why kits are useful: you design the sounds once, and the beat lives in your DAW (or the little audition groove), so you can re-skin a groove or reuse a beat under different drums without redoing either. We'll design the sounds here and keep the groove light — just enough to hear what we're doing.

Everything happens on the BENCH: the 16 hits at the top, the drum you're shaping in the middle, and the groove contact sheet at the bottom.

The plan

Decide the parts and the hit + body for each before touching the picture — picking the right pair is most of the result, because each half is shaped for a job.

"Best at" is a starting point, not a fence. You can put a clap into a metal body or a beater into a string — the whole point of hit-and-body is that the pairing is free. We picked the obvious five so the *why* stays front and centre.

The loop you'll repeat

For every track the moves are the same:

1. Select the track on the groove contact sheet so the drum above points at it.
2. Pick the hit — step the HIT card with its < > arrows, or open its ▾ library and audition named halves until one is close.
3. Pick the body — the same, on the BODY card.
4. (Optional, recommended for beginners) hit PRESETS ▾ on the drum's header and load a matching factory sound, then nudge it. A preset resets to defaults and overlays the recipe, so it's a clean, repeatable starting point.
5. Drag the picture — each half draws itself, and the drawing is the control. The steps below say what to drag and why.

Treat the target feels as a sensible centre, not a law — once you understand the why, moving them is the fun part. Need an exact number? Right-click any handle and type it.

Step 1 — Track 1: the kick (Beater → Sine)

A kick is a beater striking a body that booms: a Sine body with a fast pitch drop into a low landing, plus a short beater tick on the onset.

• The landing line — drag the dashed line where the pitch fall comes to rest down to about a low ~50 Hz. That's the sweet spot for a kick felt on club speakers but still audible on small ones; lower (40–45) is deeper sub, higher is punchier and smaller.
• The pitch fall — grab the falling curve's start height and its knee. A tall, fast fall is the "click/punch" of the attack; flatten it toward nothing for a pure tone with no thump. Keep the fall fast for a tight kick — a slow one becomes a "zap".
• The body decay — drag the body's tail to about a punchy ~0.3 s; lengthen toward 1 s+ for an 808-style sustained sub.
• The hit ↔ body wire — thicken the beater's wire a little for a "tick" that cuts through a mix (presence on small speakers); leave the body wire dominant so the drum is mostly boom.
• A touch of drive on the body→sum block adds weight and harmonics so the kick isn't a sterile sine.

Result: a tight, punchy kick. Want it deeper? Drop the landing and lengthen the tail.

Step 2 — Track 2: the snare (Noise burst → Shell)

A snare sums a tonal shell (the body "thump") with a band-passed noise burst (the "wires" rattle), crossfaded by one balance.

• The shell pitch — set the body around ~190 Hz for a standard backbeat snare; raise for a tighter snare, lower for a fat one.
• The noise band — slide and pinch the band so it sits around ~4 kHz (reads as "snare wires"); higher is brighter and thinner.
• The hit ↔ body wire (the balance) — this is the snare. Push it just past centre so the noise leads while the shell still gives weight — the classic blend. Toward the body it's a tom; all the way to noise with a sharp attack it's a clap-ish hit.
• The decay — keep the tail short and snappy; lengthen for a roomier snare.

Result: a 909-ish backbeat snare.

Step 3 — Track 3: the closed hat (Noise burst → No body)

Nothing rings on a hat, so the body is No body — the sound is all hit. Step the noise's colour pill to metallic for a realistic pitched rattle (white is a softer, airier hat).

• The high-pass corner — a hat is all top-end, so drag the corner up to cut the lows; the higher it sits, the crisper and thinner the tick.
• The decay — the single most important handle here: keep it very short. That short tail is what makes it closed.
• A hint of drive for bite; keep it low so it stays clean.

Result: a crisp closed hat. The short decay is the whole difference between closed and open — which is exactly Step 4.

Step 4 — Track 4: the open hat (Noise burst → No body)

Set up the same drum as the closed hat (same colour, same high-pass), then change one thing: lengthen the decay into a long, ringing tail. Everything else matching means the two read as the same instrument, open vs. closed.

**Why a separate track?** Two tracks let the **closed hat choke the open one** — when a closed hat fires it cuts off the ringing open hat, like a real hi-hat pedal. The factory hat kits are wired this way (it's saved in the kit); start from one of those to inherit the behaviour. The fastest way to build a sibling like this yourself is **Duplicate track** on the drum's right-click menu — it copies the sound and choke-groups the pair for you. See [Auditioning your kit](../features/bench.md#choke).

Step 5 — Track 5: the clap (Clap → No body)

The Clap hit is a band-passed noise gated by a three-burst envelope (the slapping hands); the body stays No body because hands don't ring.

• The three ticks — the clap draws its bursts as ticks on the time axis. Drag the last one to set the gap between hands: tight is a sharp single-sounding slap, wide is a sloppy crowd clap.
• The noise band — around ~1.5 kHz is the natural dark/full clap; raise toward 4 kHz+ for a bright finger-snap.
• Give it a little room (below) so the clap sits in a space — that tail is most of what reads as "clap".

Result: a 909-ish clap.

Step 6 — Balance the kit

Five good sounds still need balancing. Each track carries a level and a pan (utility controls — see the contact sheet), plus its own room.

• Level — the foundation pyramid: kick loudest, snare/clap just under it, hats clearly below both. If everything is at max, nothing is. Leave headroom.
• Pan — keep the kick, snare and clap centred (they carry the groove and the low end); push the hats slightly off-centre to open the stereo image — the cheapest way to make a kit feel wide.
• Room — space is per voice, not a shared send. Give the snare and clap a little room (on the ROOM tile, lift the tail's left edge to about a quarter height, then pull its end out to roughly halfway across) to set them in a space, and keep the kick dry so the low end stays tight. Because the room lives on the voice, it's p-lockable per hit like anything else. See the room.

Rule of thumb: solo nothing. Balance with everything playing — a kit is a *blend*, not five solos.

Step 7 — Make it breathe (optional, but it's what sells a kit)

Static drums sound like a machine. A few cheap moves make the rack feel alive — all shift-drag on the Bench (see Per-hit sound design):

• A little breathe on the snare's level so no two backbeats are identical.
• A hair of timing spread for a human, un-quantised feel.
• P-locks for the deliberate moments — the one fill hit that's always pitched up — while breathe covers everything else.

These animate the sounds you just built; they live on the audition groove, not the kit.

**Want a per-hit move to play in your DAW?** A *whole-track* breathe already does — it's part of the sound. A **single-hit** p-lock or breathe is a design-time sketch; to ship it, right-click the track → **Duplicate track**, tweak the copy, and play its note where you want the variant (`T1 T1 T2 T1`). The duplicate is auto-**choke-grouped** with the original — the same trick as the open/closed hats in Step 4 — so the two behave as one drum. (Set or change a choke group from that same menu.)

Step 8 — Save your kit

Open the Kits library from the header:

1. Type a name (e.g. My First House Kit).
2. Add tags, comma-separated (house, techno, starter) — tags are how you'll find it once your library grows.
3. Click Save current kit.

The whole rack — every track's sound, the macros and the per-voice config — is written as one file. The groove is stripped, so loading this kit later re-skins whatever beat you're working on without touching it. Full library reference (load, delete, new kit): Presets & kits → Kits.

Where to go next

• Push each sound further — every hit and body has a "Design recipes" section in Drum.
• Understand the shared tools on every track — the voice chain, the velocity strip, and LFOs.
• Play it in your DAW — pads, macros and transport.

Build a few kits this way and the table at the top stops being a recipe and becomes instinct: you'll hear "that's a beater into a sine, a clap into nothing" before you reach for the picture.