Creating a Drum Rack in Ableton Live

Hello again. Here is a video I made showing how to create your own drum sounds in Ableton Live. I use a bunch of great mappings and clip properties to make finding hits a fun process; then I use the hits to create a playable drum rack. The drum rack creation and editing process is taken much further in the course Advanced Music Production in Ableton Live at http://berkleemusic.com.

If you want to download the Live session itself, check out my blog: http://loudonstearns.berkleemusicblogs.com/

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Create Drum Rack
• Ableton Live
• Drum
• Drum Rack
• Loudon
• Berklee
• Berkleemusic
• Live
• Music
• Mapping
• Clips

[DrGoldsylver]

hello great vid,which midi controller are u using in this demo?

[LoudonYukon]

@DrGoldsylver Novation SL

[Morylory]

I notice your encoder is moving in steps of 31 samples per step ! but how to set it that its moving in 1 x sample steps, wouldn't this be more accurate for setting start and end points .. Do you know how to set this up please? thank you

[LoudonYukon]

@Morylory Use a shorter sample, the longer the sample the larger the jumps, total bummer really.

[gomachols]

does anyone else think its funny that all this is so nice and helpful and all, but the audio file sounds like robot farts???? "thats a pretty nice kick" Thats an AWFUL kick. nice workflow tho. pretty helpful tips too. next time, maybe try using something that resembles a drum sound!

[LoudonYukon]

@gomachols I agree, the sounds as they are here, are not very inspiring. But that is the power of drum racks, continue with the process of transposing, EQ, and adjusting envelpopes. Sound design is a long process(longer then the 10 mins allowed in a Youtube vid!) and it takes some imagination in the earlier steps. Thanks for the comment.

Loudon

[midihooker]

isent the slice to midi feature easier?? slice a audio file directly to a sampler/simpler and off you go..

[midihooker]

@zubeats

there are no plugins in this vid..

[zubeats]

where do you get your plug ins from?

[deadhenderson]

Why not just import the whole sample into Arrangement view, choose each hit linearly and then adjust transpose or any other parameter in each respective Simpler? For the life of me, I can't see the benefit of this method. I may be misunderstanding something, but it seems to be a very long way to do something much simpler. There's no real wrong or right way to do things, I guess. That's what makes Ableton Live so friggin' awesome.

[fimpson]

Quite a fascinating sound to make a rack out of. You could spend a couple of hours on that, just EQing it etc. Obviously the sounds you have there aren't fantastic, but they definitley have potential. If you don't mind me asking, where did you get the sound from? Is it a segment of a song or something?

[ansiaaa666]

I've recently bought a MPK25 and I wanted to replicate what you did in this vid.

but I've just found out that the rotary encoders send absolute values (0...127) and must be configured as NRPN to make em work as incremental encoders (-/+1). but what is the right configuration of the NRPN parameters for Live? do you have any clue about how to configure them? I can't find any information online, only other people looking for help like me!

tnx in advance! and tnx for your great videos!

[sk6mix]

Stop criticizing the sounds he used people! I believe this was more or less an example of how to use your control surface to find drum sounds for use in drum rack.  I found it very educational and I could give a shit less what sounds he used.