DR32 — Drum Rack 32

What it is

DR32 loads Move's own .ablpreset drum kits and plays them through a reconstruction of the same Drum Sampler voice — so a kit built on the device opens here and sounds like itself, with twice the pads.

It is a Schwung sound generator: add it to a chain slot like any other instrument. It has no interface of its own. Every page below is Schwung's own knob grid.

The pages

Jog moves between pages. The pad banks — Pad, Shape (or a synth pad's own pages) and Mix — all edit the same pad, so the pad you pick on one is the pad you are editing on all of them. On Category, click to go in, then click a row to open that category's kits.

Loading kits

DR32 opens empty. Kits live under Category, grouped by the library's own folders, with everything you have made under My Kits. Init, at the top, holds one kit, Init: it puts DR32 back exactly as it is when you first load it — every pad empty, every setting at its default.

Going into a category loads its first kit, the same as scrolling onto it would — unless the kit you have loaded is in that category, in which case the list opens on it and nothing is reloaded. Choosing Init is therefore all it takes to load Init.

The list is built by DR32 rather than by the file browser, and only real drum racks appear in it. The first time you open it, DR32 reads the library in the background, so for a moment the list may show only Init while the rest fills in. Move's preset folder holds presets for every instrument — on a typical device, several hundred files of which only a fraction are drum kits — so a plain file browser would offer you a great many things that cannot load.

Pads

32 pads, notes 36–67. Hitting a pad selects it for editing while the transport is stopped; with a pattern running, the editor follows only on a host that reports live presses. The PAD knob selects a pad by hand, and shows its number, 1–32, in large type. A kit's drums are seated by the note that plays them, so pad 1 is always note 36 and the number you see is the pad you hit.

Pad, Shape and Mix are views of the same pad — pick it on any one of them and it is picked on all of them. Each pad's name in the header follows what it plays, a sample's name or a synth drum's, and updates as soon as you change it.

Engine

ENGN chooses what the pad plays. It opens a picker with a section per engine: Sample leads to Move's library and your own, and each synth engine lists its drums (see Synth drums). Scroll to put a drum on the pad and hear it; click to keep it and close.

On a sample pad, ENGN opens in the folder its sample came from, with the cursor on it, so you can step through neighbouring samples by ear. A sample you pick plays to its end: picking one sets the pad to Trigger with Hold at Inf. Turn Hold down on Shape for a shorter hit.

Shaping

Synth drums

Any pad can play a synthesised drum instead of a sample. Pick one from ENGN and the pad stops being a sampler and plays that engine's voice. Mix them freely: a sampled kick, an 8W8 cowbell and an Urchin ride can sit in one kit. Everything around the voice stays DR32's — volume, pan, choke groups, the sends, the buses, Copy and Link treat a synth pad exactly as a sample pad.

Every drum starts from its engine's own factory values and is yours to change. A synth pad has no Start/End, Shape page or Punch, because those belong to the sampler.

Engines from other modules

A module installed beside DR32 can offer its own voices as engines. If one of your modules does, ENGN shows a section named after it, below DR32's own, listing its drums; the pad's pages are that module's knobs. There is nothing to set up, and these pads work like any other synth pad: volume, pan, choke groups, sends, buses, Copy, Link and Resample all apply.

The module has to be installed for the pad to play. If you open a set on a Move that does not have it, the pad is silent and its name reads “name missing”. Nothing is lost: the pad keeps its sound and settings in the set, and plays again once the module is installed. A newly installed module's section appears after the Move has restarted.

The drum machines

9W9, 6W6, 8W8 and CW-78 each give a pad one drum of the machine, played exactly as the machine plays it. Their page is Voice, the machine's own panel for that drum:

The knobs run 0–127, like the machines' own. What the machines have around their drums — reverb, delay, master drive, the CW-78's rhythm player — is not here: DR32's Mix page and the sends do that job.

Copying pads

Hold Copy and hit a pad: that pad is the source. Every pad you hit while you keep holding is pasted into — sample and all. Hold Delete and hit pads to clear them back to defaults, and Undo puts back the last pad you overwrote.

It is the oldest gesture a drum rack has, and it works off the pads themselves rather than a menu, so building a kit out of one good snare takes a couple of seconds.

What travels is the whole pad, not just what happens to be on the page you are looking at: the sample (or the synth drum and all its knobs) first, then tuning, envelope, filter, level, pan, sends, Wide and Punch. What does not travel is what makes a pad that pad — its note, and where it sits in its own sample folder.

Link

LINK sets one parameter across every pad at once. Click it on, turn a knob and every pad takes that value. It releases as soon as you change anything else — another knob, a sample, a browse step, the master level — so the next thing you touch is the focused pad's alone. Playing a pad does not end it, so you can audition while you sweep.

A synth knob spreads to the pads that have that knob — the Decay of an 8W8 drum reaches every 8W8 pad and no other. It never spreads the things that make a pad a distinct pad: its sample, its synth drum, its note, or the sample-browse position. It is off whenever DR32 loads.

Buses and sends

DR32 publishes all 32 pads to Schwung's module bus framework. The host can group any subset of them onto a bus that renders into its own buffer and carries its own chain of insert effects — hats through a reverb while the kick stays dry, or the whole top end through a compressor without touching the low drums. You build the groups in Schwung rather than in DR32, and the pads arrive named after the samples in the loaded kit, so you pick Kick 707 rather than voice 3. Pad identity is stable, so a routing survives loading a different kit.

Each pad has its own SNDA and SNDB amount, in decibels, feeding Schwung's two global return buses. Put whatever effect you like on a return and every pad can tap it at its own level — one reverb shared by the kit, rather than one inside each pad. A kit imported from Move brings its own send amounts with it.

Saving

Your edits are stored in the Schwung set, on top of the kit that was loaded — so a set records which kit you used and what you changed about it. Kits themselves are Move's files and are never modified.

Synth pads live in the set only. A Move kit holds samples, so a kit that mixes samples and synth drums is kept in your set, and loading a Move kit turns every pad back into a sample pad.

Resample

Resample turns a pad into a sample of what it plays and puts that sample on the pad. It is the last page: jog to it and click in, as on Category, then pick a row — the screen for it opens right there. (The row highlight appears with your first turn or click after clicking in.) Cancel or OK comes back to the list; Back leaves.

Resample Pad shows the pad you last hit by hand — its number and name, and on the next line the velocity you hit it with. It follows as you hit pads. Choose Resample to take that pad at that velocity, or Cancel. Resample Kit asks “Resample all non-sample pads in kit?” — every synth pad, at velocity 100. Sample pads and empty pads are left alone.

The sound is baked in: the engine and its knobs, tuning, the envelope, the filter and Punch come back to neutral, so nothing is applied twice. Volume, Pan, the sends, the Stereo page and Choke stay live, and the level is matched — a hit at the captured velocity sounds exactly as it did. A sample pad keeps its velocity response; a synth pad's is baked at the captured velocity. Effects on a module bus are not captured — the host adds them after DR32 — and the pad stays on its bus, so they keep working on it.

Files go to User Library › Samples › DR32 Resample, 24-bit, named for the sound, the velocity and the date (“FM Kick v100 2026-09-22”), with a number added if the name is taken. Capture stops after a second of silence, or at 20 seconds. It runs in the background: the pad keeps playing its old sound until the file is written, and leaving the screen does not stop it. If you change the pad while it runs, the file is still saved but the pad is not switched.

Known limits

• Pads 17–32 sit outside Move's 4×4 pad map, so the small map in the header does not light for them.
• Per-pad playback effects other than Punch are parsed and preserved — kits stay lossless and reopen correctly on Move — but they are not played back.
• Return-chain effects saved inside a Move kit are preserved, but not set up for you.
• Browsing kits has no undo, as above.
• In a kit with very many different engines, a pad's engine pages can take a moment to appear. Each engine's pages take room in what DR32 hands the host. DR32's own engines all fit together. With enough engines from other modules in the kit, DR32 keeps the pages of the pad you are on and of the engines you used last; move to a pad whose engine is not among them and you see Pad and Mix first, and its engine pages a fraction of a second later.
• An engine from another module needs that module installed; without it the pad is silent until the module is back.
• Each drum-machine pad is a whole machine of its own, so two 8W8 hat pads do not share their oscillators the way the machine's own hats do.

Credits

DR32's synth drums are other people's instruments, carried over whole. Thank you to everyone who made them and shared them.

DR32 runs on Schwung by Charles Vestal, who also contributed fixes to DR32 itself. The Faust engines are compiled with Faust by GRAME.