1. Choose a pad and press the red Record button. Make a sound, then stop. (Turn on With the beat to record in time with it.)
  2. Or Find a Sound: drum-machine hits, recorded drums and percussion, single notes of piano, marimba, strings and more — and My Sounds, the ones you've kept. Tap one to put it on the pad and hear it; Undo puts the old one back.
  3. Already recorded something you like — a sung line, a guitar riff? Turn it into a pad's sound: tap the take on the Timeline → Put on a Pad, or the square-grid button beside it on its Record page, or in its take panel Tweak → Put on a Sampler Pad (in Beginner, its card → Add it to Your own sounds; on the Scratch Pad, its ⋯). Just the part the take plays is copied onto the first empty pad; the take stays in the song, and Undo takes the pad's copy off.
  4. Starting from nothing? While every pad is empty, pick a starter kit — Beat Machine, Acoustic or Lo-Fi — and all 16 pads fill at once: drums first, then percussion and a few notes. Undo takes the whole kit off.
  5. Drag the handles on the waveform to trim it. Sound adjusts volume, pan, tune, Tone (darker and muffled, or thinner and brighter), play mode and fades.
  6. Use in beat → Add as a Drum makes the sound a drum: a row of its own on the Beat screen and a pad in Pads, with the drums' tuning, length and effects. Or tap any drum's name on the Beat screen → Sound → Your Sounds.
  7. Chop spreads one recording across several pads — at the hits, into equal pieces, or exactly where you choose. Chop onto the beat also lays the pieces on the beat, a drum row each, playing your loop back — move their hits around to flip it.
  8. Keyboard turns the pad's sound into a playable instrument across a keyboard.
  9. Lock to the beat: a loop stays 1, 2, 4 or 8 bars long at any tempo — speed the song up and the loop keeps up, at the same pitch.
  10. Keep it saves the sound, just as it's set, to My Sounds for any song.
  11. Loop or hold: One-shot plays to the end; Hold plays while you hold the pad; Loop repeats it while held. In the beat, Hold and Loop last until that row's next hit — a looping pad on beat 1 plays the whole bar, cut off by the next hit.
  12. The Sample row on the Beat screen plays whichever pad “In the beat” shows, in time.
  13. Plays in, at the top, shows the song's parts: tap one to bring the Sample row in or drop it out of that part.