Shaping a pad

Everything here is per pad

Every setting on this page belongs to the selected pad, not the whole sampler. The kick can be loud and centered while the hat is quiet and panned to one side.

Tap a pad to select it. The controls follow the selection.

Volume, rate and pan

One slider controls all three. The Volume, Rate and Pan keys choose which one the slider moves. The lit key is the active one, and all three values are shown underneath.

• Volume is the pad’s level, from silent to full.
• Rate is playback speed. Changing it also changes pitch, like speeding up a record. The scale is logarithmic with original speed at the center, so equal distances on either side are equal musical intervals.
• Pan places the pad in the stereo field. C is center, and L50 is halfway to the left.

Double-click the slider handle, or double-tap on a phone, to reset the active parameter: volume to full, rate to original speed, or pan to center. The other two keep their settings.

Direction

Direction switches the pad between forward and reverse. The setting stays until you switch it back. Slices chopped from a reversed pad are reversed too, so they sound the way they did when you marked them.

Playback: one-shot or gated

Playback decides what happens when you let go of a pad.

• One-shot plays the sound to the end, even if you let go. A tap is enough. Use this for drums.
• Gated plays only while the pad is held and stops when you release it. Use this for sustained notes or long samples you want to play like an instrument.

Loop is a separate setting that works with either mode. A looping pad repeats until it is stopped or triggered again.

Color and image

Color sets the pad’s color. The color appears everywhere the pad does: the grid, the sequencer and the visualizer. Coloring pads by type makes a kit easier to play at a glance.

The same screen accepts a background image, which you can zoom and position in a pad-shaped frame. It is decorative, but it makes one sampler easy to tell from another.