Drums and kits

A drum track plays its hits through a kit. The kit decides the sound; the hits stay the same, so you can try another kit at any time and hear the same part on it. Writing the hits is in Drum lanes.

Drum kits, stems and the drum synth

Available on every platform.

Choose a kit

A drum track’s kit button opens its sound chooser, a small card listing every kit it can play. The button is:

in the Sound pane, under KIT on the drum track’s Source;
in the Mixer, on the drum track’s strip.

The chooser has:

On this device: the sampled kits here, then Drum Synth › (Stab’s own synthesised kit; its page has Acoustic, 808 and 909, the drum synth playing a drum machine’s voices) and SoundFont Kit (the General MIDI kits of the SoundFont, each piece on its own channel so it keeps its own mix).
Kit presets: the kit’s mixes, a Rock, Metal, Jazz or Lo-Fi kit.
Fits this song · to get: a few kits from the Sound Library with their demos; Get downloads one and puts it on the track in one step, and All › opens the library at the kits that fit. Sound Library… at its foot, to browse the kits and hear their demos.
Your files, in a dashed box marked third-party: a kit of your own the song plays, and your own SFZ kits (below).
Sound Library… and Load Kit from Disk… (below).

The kit you’re on is checked. Choosing one is one undo step, and the card closes. Esc or a click outside it closes it too.

Which SoundFont kit plays is in the track’s menu (right-click the track’s header), under Sound: Standard Kit, Room Kit, Power Kit, Electronic Kit, TR-808 Kit, Jazz Kit, Brush Kit and Orchestra Kit, or Drum Synth.

Sampled kits and the Stab Kit

A sampled kit plays recordings of a real kit. The Stab Kit is one, made for Stab and recorded through nine microphones; others are in the Sound Library. A piece the sampled kit has no recordings for is played by the drum synth, so nothing you wrote goes silent.

A song names the sampled kit it plays. On a device that doesn’t have it, the kit’s button says Not installed and the track plays its built-in kit until you download it; the chooser’s Sound Library… takes you there. While a kit loads, the button says Loading…; if it can’t be read, Couldn’t load.

What new songs’ drums play on this device is set in Settings › Sounds, under New Songs Play (see The Sound Library).

Load a kit of your own

Load Kit from Disk… plays a sampled kit you have: an SFZ kit, a DrumGizmo kit, or a kit.json kit. Choose its folder, or its .sfz, kit .xml or kit.json file. Your own kits are third-party: they show under Your files in the chooser, never in the Sound Library, and a song refers to them where they are, as it would a plugin (on another device the kit is missing until it’s there too).

The song reads the kit from where it is, so keep its folder in place. If you move it, a Sounds button appears in the toolbar: its list says Couldn’t load and offers Locate….

On the web, a song plays the kits built into Stab; the Sound Library is there to browse and hear, and there’s no Load Kit from Disk….

Stems

A kit can come out as stems, each with its own effects and level: Show Stems on the drum track’s Source in the Sound pane splits it into a lane per stem. Stems chooses how many:

Grouped: kick, snare, toms, hi-hat, cymbals, percussion, overheads and room.
Detailed: as Grouped, with the toms, the ride and the crashes parted. A group’s effects go onto each of its stems.

Nothing you hear changes until you add something to a stem. See The Sound pane.

Swing and groove

The kit’s Source has a FEEL section:

Humanize moves each hit a little in time and level, as a player would. At 0 %, every hit is where it’s written.
Swing, from 50 % (straight) to 75 %: the second note of each pair moves later. 66 % swings like triplets, 75 % is dotted.
Swing On: Eighths or Sixteenths, the pairs counted from each bar.
Groove: where each piece sits against the beat. Laid Back puts the snare behind it, Pushed the hats ahead, Loose the kick early and the snare late. None is as written.

The feel changes only what you hear: the hits stay where you wrote them.