Big drumkits have bad usability

[YuriSizov]

This is something that I've been thinking about a lot. Kits are good, but you usually don't need every item in them. Since you can't build your own kits, you may end up with a setup where 90% of the kit is unused, and the parts which are used are too far apart.

Here's another explanation of this issue from a Reddit comment by pwndepot:

The Instrument->Drumkit-> MIDI Drumkit and SiON Drumkits both have a ton of sounds, but I find them kind of hard to use because the lists are so long. If I pick sounds on the top and bottom of the list, I cannot see them both on the screen simultaneously. And to be honest, I find that when composing a drum beat, I rarely need more than maybe 6-12 total sounds anyway.

I find myself using the Instrument->Drumkit->Simple Drumkit primarily because it's smaller so you can see all the sound choices on screen at the same time when composing a beat. The only drawback there is that you limited to only those 8 preset sounds.

This got me thinking about a feature from Ableton Live where you could build your own drumkit with pre-existing sounds. I think it would be awesome if there was a "custom drumkit" so I could drag and drop a few sounds from the MIDI Drumkit, a few sounds from the SiON kit, and a few from the Simple kit into my own custom kit with like ~8-12 fillable slots. Then you could make custom kits based on the needs of each song you're composing without having dozens of extra sounds you're not using taking up screen real estate. I think this would greatly improve drum beat creativity as well as workflow when composing beats.

I can think of some temporary improvements for the 3.x branch, but to have anything persistent we'd need to change the file format, and it's a 4.0 material. Maybe a toggle that would hide rows which don't have notes in them, but only at runtime, without any persistency?