What Pad Layout Do You Use In Your Drum Kits?

You’re probably familiar with the drum kit layout used in Akai’s factory kits which normally places a kick, snare, closed hat and open hat on the bottom row of pads (A01 to A04).

This layout works fine for basic drum kits, but we found that placing all the primary kit articulations on the bottom row of kit was less than optimal for more complex multisampled kits, especially from a finger drumming perspective where you often need to access many different pads with minimum effort.

In our multisampled drum kits we place the core articulations on the second pad row:

With your hands centred around the primary drum pads on the second row of pads you can easily access all the ‘secondary’ pads on the rows immediately above and below without having to move your hands at all - just a little finger movement covers 12 pads with no effort, plus the top row requires only a small hand movement or finger stretch.

With the ‘bottom row’ style layout , if you position your hands over the ‘primary’ drum pads (row 1) you really only have easy access to the first and second rows (i.e. 8 pads).

You’ll find our optimised finger drumming layout is in all our multisampled drum kit collections; MPC Drummer and Dirty Drummer.

I have my own preferred kit layout - how do I change the layout of a kit?

You can use the ‘COPY PADS’ functionality to move pads around into any layout you prefer. Some people like to arrange their primary articulations in a vertical style, some like to set up a ‘mirror’ style layout. Check out my MPC pad re-arrangement workflow tutorial.

Once you’ve re-arranged a kit to your preferred layout, just head over to MAIN > program row pencil icon > SAVE CURRENT PROGRAM and save your new version somewhere safe. If the original kit was from a specific expansion you could even save it inside the folder for that expansion on your MPC disk, making your kit now part of that expansion (remember to give it a unique name so the original version is left untouched and still available as a backup).