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As mentioned earlier, you will be using one standard pad controller setup for finger drumming most of the time. Your pad controller’s MIDI note values, as well as other parameters, usually can be changed hardware- and/or software-wise.
The XpressPads standard pad controller setup is what’s called a “basic 4-piece setup,” which contains the bass drum, snare drum and two toms (= four pieces) plus the hi-hat , a ride cymbal and a crash cymbal.
The 4-piece setup layout on the pad controller is reflected in the following graphic. If you do not find the suitable preset for your pad controller on our website, you need to create one exactly as shown here.
XpressPads 4×4 pad controller layouts
The red numbers indicate the GM note values:
This setup triggers general MIDI standard drum sounds. By definition, these kit piece/sound mappings are the same on any software or hardware sound module that offers a GM drum kit preset in its library.
You do not need your pads to send MIDI continuous control (CC) values, so in the case that your pad controller supports CC for the pads, I recommend that you turn the sending of CC values off in order to avoid unnecessarily occupying the bandwidth of MIDI data that will be transferred from the pad controller to the DAW.
If your DAW or pad controller uses a different MIDI scheme, you will need to find out the note offset to the standard MIDI note scheme and adjust the above table accordingly. Usually the offset is octave-wise. Example: If you would have an offset of two octaves (= 24 half steps), your Bass Drum would be C4 (60) instead of C2 (36).