Which Drum Sample Packs work best with Kit Maker? This article explains how drum packs with lots of labeled or organized one-shot drum sounds work best.
If you are having issues processing Sample Packs, please make sure to read the Help Processing Drum Sample Packs article!
Packs with one-shot samples
One-shots are short sounds such as individual drum hits (kicks, snares, hi hats etc) or melodic notes (a synth note, a piano chord, a short guitar strum).
Kit Maker lays out these short one-shot samples onto pads on each kit it creates. The short sounds work well for playing multiple sounds quickly and creating a pattern.
Packs that primarily include one-shot drum samples will create drum kit presets, with each drum sound laid onto the pads in a logical order.
Even a pack with lots of melodic one-shots works great with Kit Maker. These packs will make kits of melodic sounds that fill the pads, making inspiring presets that have the sounds already loaded.
Packs with lots of samples
Kit Maker uses the one-shot samples to create 16-pad kits until it runs out of sample files. If your pack contains only 64 samples, that is only enough for four kits.
However, if you have a pack with 320 samples, you can end up with 20 kits! The more one-shot samples, the more kits Kit Maker can make from them.
If your pack has less than 64 usable samples, Kit Maker will still process the pack, but will alert you that it found few samples to use.
Packs that are organized
As you have likely seen in the description of our app, it uses Keywords that it looks for in folder names and filenames. If you have a pack that has folders with clear keywords like “Kicks”, “Snares”, “Guitar Chords” etc, Kit Maker will do a good job mapping these onto the pads of each kit.
If your sample pack contains folders with random names, or no sub folders and loose filenames, our app won’t know how to categorize them. For example, if it mainly contains random names like “the big sound.wav” and “squirrel nuts.wav”, Kit Maker can still create kits from them, but they will not be organized onto the pads in a logical layout.
Packs that aren’t mainly loops
As explained earlier, Kit Maker works best with one-shot samples. Some packs focus primarily on loop samples, which are longer audio files meant to be repeated. Examples include drum breaks or melodic loops.
Kit Maker filters out loops by excluding folders that include words like “loops”, “breaks” etc by default (these Excluded keywords can be edited or removed in the Edit Keywords window of Kit Maker).
There is also a “Large File Filter” that excludes audio files that are over 2mb, which is enabled by default. If Kit Maker alerts you that it cannot find more than 64 usable samples, it could be that the pack contains many large samples or loops that are being filtered out. The “Large File Filter” can be disabled in the main window if you do want to include large samples (not recommended for most users).
Most users don’t want to play drum pads and then accidentally trigger a long audio sample that drowns all the other sounds out. They want to play shorter samples and create their own patterns.
Packs that focus on looping samples won’t work well for Kit Maker, as that is not the intention of the app.
If you still have issues, remember to read the Help Processing Drum Sample Packs article! You can also view our Technical Help page which has lots of solutions to common problems!