Why are drum pads not a valid MIDI input the screen controls pallet?

Question

I'm slowly getting around to creating a Concert that represents my controller setup and realized that the drum pads have a different behavior.
When setting up my Korg nanoPAD as a drum sample controller, I have to map it to a keyboard and not a 2x6 drum pad group. If I do not assign it to a keyboard, I cannot associate it with a channel strip playing back an EXS drum kit. They keyboard drop down in the MIDI input properties for a channel strip will not list the nanoPAD as an input even though I have already associated the pads with their virtual counterparts in the Layout tab.
I can manually assign each pad to a MIDI note, but that sends the note event to all channel strips and I have no control over that.
What gives??
It looks really lame to have another keyboard widget in my concert layout when all want is a representation of the 12 pads on the nanoPAD.

Answer 1

In edit mode, you should be able to create mappings that effectively transform your incoming drum pad note into another note on a specific channel strip. You can create multiple mappings per drum pad in order to trigger different sounds on different notes per channel strip.
If you don't want a keyboard you can also use the "MIDI activity" object, it acts like a keyboard but takes up less space and doesn't display layers. It also glows to let you know that MIDI activity is coming in. Since all of the routing happens through screen objects, you need some sort of object there to do the routing -- either the MIDI activity object or the keyboard. The drum pads let you have additional flexibility since they allow you to make mappings (including changing patches, etc.), but the routing still needs to happen through one of the two routing objects unless you want to make each drum pad directly as I explained above.