Drum racks - Ableton Live Tutorial

- The third and final type of rack is the drum rack, which allows you to create custom drum sets and map samples to pads where they can be independently triggered and processed. So I've got exercise four from chapter nine open, and let's build a drum rack from scratch here. I'm going to go to my first track and I'm going to go to the instruments category and I'm going to grab a drum rack here from the list of instruments that are available. Now, once I've got this loaded on the track, I can see that I've got a number of what look like pads here, and each one of those have a MIDI note name on them. So if I press a C1 on my MIDI keyboard, it'll trigger this pad and so on and so forth. So, next steps would usually be to go into your samples category and maybe do a search here for kick, and go through your kick samples, but I've actually collected a bunch of samples for us, and those are in the current project. So if you've opened up exercise four, you can just click on current project and you'll see a samples folder and then an imported sub folder, and then you'll see some samples here that we can use as part of this video. So I'm just going to grab the kick exclusive sample, and I'm going to map that onto that sample by just dragging and dropping it on the respective pad. Now, if you find that you put that on the wrong pad, you can click and you can drag that over to whatever pad that it needs to go to, or if you want to get rid of it entirely, you can just select that pad and hit delete, and it's gone. Let me grab that again, and I'll put that back on C1, and then I'll point out that not only did we get a sample loaded on this pad, but we actually got a simpler virtual instrument loaded and the sample was then loaded into that simpler. So we have all of the functionality of this virtual instrument to shape how this sample is triggered. For example, and by the way, I'll normally put this on one shot mode when I'm using this on a drum rack, but I can use the out flag to set the end of where I want that sample to end, and I can add a little bit of a fade out, and things like this will help you control the decay on the sample. You can also zoom in here on the front and make sure that you like the alignment of where the sample start point is. All right, so now that I've got that one mapped, I'll go ahead and I'll grab a few more. Let me get the kick long sample that I use, which is this 8 0 8 long. I'll put that on C-sharp and then the snare low-fi sample, I'll put that on D1, and the snare clap, I'm going to put that on D sharp. And where is it? The clap? This one here, I'll put that on E, and then I'll add some hi-hat samples to finish. I'm going to grab the H H D1 V1, I'll put that on F sharp, and I'll put the vinyl one on G sharp. Oops, let me drag back down where I need to go. There we go. And I'll put that in the right spot. By the way, that's just an indication that you can use this strip to navigate. So you can go up on this strip by just clicking and dragging that box to go up and down to get to the octave that you want to be in, and you'll notice that as I accidentally got in the wrong octave, I was able to actually move my cursor with the sample over that box area and it came back to that octave and I was able to load the sample on the MIDI note where I wanted to load it. So I've got the basic samples loaded here. Let's hear what this clip sounds like before we do anything else. [Punchy Musical Beat] All right, that sounds okay but it needs some work. Now, to get on with that work, I'm going to open up the chain list, which is this button here that's in the bottom of these four, which are similar to the buttons that we've seen on instrument racks in an earlier video. So I'll open up my chain list, and now I can see that each one of these pads has an associated chain, and as I go down this, I can see that each one of those has a simpler and the sample loaded on to the respective chain. I've got the volume and panning controls, and I can also see this same set of controls if I click the chain unfold triangle, and now I see that there's a channel strip for each one of those chains, and I've got the same mixer controls here in the mixer area as I do in the chain list. So if I click this solo button, this chain is solo, and by the way, look, it's got the solo button activated on the pad down here as well. And the same thing, if I grab the volume here, you can see it moving the fader on the track up there. So depending on where you like to work, you can do it within the chain list area, or you can do it up on the channel strips. By the way, if you want to audition one of the pads or chains, you can click the little play button here on the individual pad, you can also do the same thing up here on the launch button here next to the chain. All right, so the next thing we might want to do is add some effects to these different samples. So, I can go up into my audio effects area and let's go into our EQs, and I'm on the first chain. Let me add an EQ8 to that chain. Now this is a little bit hard to do, but I'm going to go over here and you can see that as I get to the end of the virtual instrument, but before the end of the rack, I see that blue vertical line, and if I let go, I can see that that's where I dropped that EQ8. Now, if I go up and I select the respective channel strip up here, in the kind of the session view area, you'll notice that I only see the virtual instrument and that EQ, and I actually find this easier to navigate. Sometimes I'll minimize the virtual instrument, so I've got more room to work and now I can go up, for example, and grab a compressor and put that after the EQ in this case. If I want to do something, maybe on the snare track, I'll select that one. And let's say, I want a compressor there, and I also want to go up and grab the drum bus plugin from the drive and color area, and I'll put that after the compressor. So if I go to this track, I can see there's the kick sample, there's the plugins for that one. If I go to the snare track, I can see there's that sample and here's the two different plugins. Similarly, if I go back to the rack, I can see the snare sample on the snare chain, and I can see those two plugins. Now, if I want to add a plugin that will process all of these simultaneously, I'll need to put that outside the rack. So for example, if I wanted to have just a little bit of limiting, I could go into my dynamics and grab the limiter plugin, and I'll put that outside the rack. So as all of these chains get processed here, they will be output as a stereo signal and the stereo signal will then go through any plugins that are outside the rack. Something that I might do just to clean things up would be to color and name my chains. So I might right click on this, choose rename from the contextual menu. I'm going to call that one kick one. I might right click again and choose a color from the menu. Go down to the next one, rename that one. Call that one kick two and give that a different color. And it just makes it easier to navigate this when there's a little bit more present visual cues. By the way, as I was renaming these, you saw that it also renamed the pads. So, let's go over here on this second track that we have in the set. I'll open that up and this is essentially the exact same rack, but I've actually gone through here and added signal processing and kind of finished this rack off. So let's hear how it sounds after we kind of put all the work in. [Musical Beat] Once you get a rack to this state, you'll likely want to come over here on the drum rack header here and click the save button, and give this a name. And I'll just call this test drum rack and hit save, and now that's saved here in my user library and it's ready for use in another project. So setting up a drum rack can take a bit of time and effort, but I love the control and flexibility that they offer and I'd suggest scheduling specific time to work on drum racks, and then save them as presets so that they're ready and waiting for when you need them in a project.