Impact: Steel was designed to be as playable as possible, on both drum controllers as well as MIDI keyboards. As such, all main patches are keymapped without overlap, and can be loaded on a single channel for instant playability of all instruments. On a MIDI keyboard, hits are mapped to black keys, while scrapes, rolls, and tremolos are mapped to white keys. This increases ease of playing for composers without dedicated drum controllers.

An additional set of "L/R" patches is included as well, with left/right hand hits separated onto adjacent notes to facilitate playing fast passages.