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Play real drums with a DrumKit

Task: get real, sampled drums on a single track — kick, snare, hat and the rest — instead of one synth track per drum. A DrumKit is one instrument holding many sampled pads, each bound to a MIDI note, so a whole groove lives in one clip.

Add a drum-kit track

  1. Click + Track and choose Drum Kit.
  2. Pick a bundled kit — GMRockKit (a sampled acoustic kit) or TR-808 (electronic) — or choose Load Hydrogen kit… to import your own.

The track appears with one pad per drum voice. Each pad plays its sample at its natural pitch when its MIDI note fires, so a kick, snare and hat coexist in one clip.

Import a Hydrogen kit

Load Hydrogen kit… accepts any of:

  • a .h2drumkit archive,
  • a drumkit.xml, or
  • a kit folder.

Gloopy reads each instrument's loudest velocity layer and lays the voices out as pads.

Program the groove

A DrumKit is edited like any MIDI clip, and the kit shapes the editor:

  • In the step grid (the editor's STEPS tab), each pad is its own lane — click cells to place hits, watch the playhead sweep the columns.
  • In the piano roll, each pad sits on its own note row.

Both are views over the same notes, so they always agree.

Self-contained projects

Saving a project stores the kit inside the composition (type = "drumkit", one [[generator.pad]] per voice referencing its sample under assets/), so it stays human-readable and portable. The bundled sample demos (demo-song, demo-synthwave, …) ship their drums this way — one DrumKit track each.

See also