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Sampling & Remixing: Building Drum Racks

Lesson 17 from: Ableton Tips and Tricks

Andrew Luck

Sampling & Remixing: Building Drum Racks

Lesson 17 from: Ableton Tips and Tricks

Andrew Luck

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Lesson Info

17. Sampling & Remixing: Building Drum Racks

Lesson Info

Sampling & Remixing: Building Drum Racks

So next we're going to take a look at drum racks which is basically it nests uh one hundred twenty eight samplers all in one go ahead and bring one of those and our project and these air great tio drum racks are really useful you khun going to sign mack rose you can also create presets for these and it's the same way if you go into your user library I'm sorry pre set to default are two different things so a default is uh whenever you uh whenever you drop something in it automatically maps that out for you too these these mac rose and a preset would be a setting that you've saved of a group of sounds or something like that. So if there's a certain way that you like setting up your your drummer acts whenever you drop your samples and you can actually just drag and drop that drum rack into the defaults um into the defaults here so let's let's go ahead and set one up and then we'll do that I'm gonna just go back into these samples here or sound effects I'm gonna grab like one hundred twent...

y eight of these things cool thing is you can grab as many as you want and the best way to load a drum rackets from left to right bottom to top so what I'll do is so there's a range here in our sampler and I'm going to bring that I'm going to highlight the very bottom range and I'm gonna put it on see negative teo the very our lowest many value there in that mini channel and then I will dragged the audio and drop it like it's hot and well, you know it that's loading one hundred twenty eight samples so it'll take a couple seconds to get everything loaded up there and currently I have a a preset for going, uh that allows me to our pga these sounds so let's see here. So now we have one hundred twenty eight samples loaded in our sample air here and basically these have these have taken on a some map ings um to my pad that that I have laid out for my pad control so we want to go in here and made him up these I can I'm just gonna add some start point and trance positions to sink two rate there were actually I'm going to do gate here and then I'm gonna go back here and you sing great, okay and there and then we've got him there lined up right away. So, uh it's really quick and easy to just drop tons of these and I like to save out groups of drum racks that are kind of instrument specific um I keep one for kick drums I keep one for high hats and uh they're great and another thing I'll do a lot of times to sort of simplify my work flow is I'll use a middie effect at the beginning of the drum rack and I'll do that so that I can um so I can just span through this sounds with a dialogue so and some people use this and they call it they refer to it as like the one hundred twenty eight second week so so basically I know I've got one hundred twenty eight samples on one pad and I can just kind of dumb doll through there just one hundred basically over one hundred sounds right at your fingertips and instead the idea behind this method is that you can program the rhythm of whatever you're working on and then you can just dial it in my ear so instead of actually going through a mattek meticulously like our analytically trying to choose a sample to work with, you can just span through it in addition it with the other sounds that you have going in the mix x and it's a really great way tio to choose stuff or if you feel like you need to change it later on in the creation of the track you can do that and it and it will be based on sound choice you're not like you're not forcing something to work with white with your mix uh I have another mini effect that I I actually have a mini rack for sampler that basically just changes thie the drummer I call it the drum wrecked picture and essentially it's it just changes the active so for every um so I usually work with a the like the sixteen pads whether it's on push or on this device on the pad control and so what I'll dio is in this in this mini affect iraq I've got a chain of different actives of pitcher fax so what I'll do maybe I'll map that and now I can so I have just you know hundreds of sounds at my disposal right away very quickly and yeah I'll do that just sort of simplify uh the the interaction of the mini interface with with with like the pit track oh and let's take a quick er like another look so each basically each one of these just has the pitch effect with a different talked of setting okay another cool thing is that is that the drum racks have a return bus in them I say I want to some similar effect on each of these drum sounds I can I can put it on the return bus for the drum rack up that clip there okay so there's a send in returns section here so I'm going to put a drop some audio effects and I'll put in a river and right now see okay it actually have a drum rack or a sampler nested inside of here so I'm gonna would prefer toe access the I'm gonna I'm actually gonna put that on the reid return bus inside of the top drum rack instead I had it lined up there to do the other ones so I'm gonna drag that reverb into this return bus you can nest them inside of each other as well it's a it's a fractal vortex basically, um ok so I've got a reverb now on send a I'm gonna go over here and if you go to the bottom left ill you and it'll show your routing from all of your you can specify did just for each sound to take a certain mehdi note um in value um and you can tell it you can also tell it what to play if you wanted to play a certain know if you can actually put a soft sent on each channel and tell it to play a certain note choke basically, uh sets up a relationship with other sounds so whenever you play another sound it'll stop that one from plane I don't I don't use it too much but um it's it's actually really handy if you want sort of all a one voice at a time kind of ah maybe you've got some path like you do three chords on a drum rack and it's really fun to actually lay out like ah full sort of uh soundscape on on sixteen pad lay out sort of like drum records set up for have some drums have cem other and musical instruments, some sound effects and some chords and you can have a lot of fun with it. So, um, that going back to the return bus, we've got river bay here, so right now looks like I'm sending um these are all receiving many, and I'm gonna just like a e and if you go into the sand, it'll turn it, turn up the send send that signal to the return. Like I said, this will save you some some cpu if you're, um, if you don't want to use that, the effects that an insert style or are you don't need them on your other return bus so, um, drum rack is totally awesome. You can also map um mac rose for each of these simpler devices or any of your devices to do basically any function you wants macro zehr designed teo to map more than one thing at a time to a dial, and then you can assign that to the same midi message and control lots of things with one from one place. Yeah, so drum racks are also compatible with with any many instrument one that I really like tio use a lot, especially with my high hearts is the aarp educator it's cool for generating uh what rhythm I would see him look for my my garage hi hats well that's not what I wanted going over here to my browser and through my jeans here rio garage hats ok some just wait for those the load and then I'm gonna pull in and aarp educator and our pets are cool because it it actually will alternate if you if you have it's stepping up it'll alternate that rhythm or alternate the sounds so you can actually perform it um just you can try out different sounds you can also add some swing and you see those letters and I've just got the I'm just triggering the middie from my computer keyboard so say I've got a song idea that I'm playing around with I'm gonna maybe fire off some drums to play with and that a little bit what I love about aarp educator is that sort of let's mean audition a bunch of different drum sounds simultaneously and find combinations really quickly especially when there's one hundred twenty eight of them there at at my fingertips you can also use the media effect if you want to change the sounds and just have it on a dial and you could just keep playing basically the same no to anyone have to move your hand up and down the keyboard so uh and especially with you know a forty nine key keyboard you just it's it's really convenient and nice to have um and you can you can use the aarp educator for our high hats and in any instrument, for that matter really helpful. So one disadvantage that I will warn you of is that in my experience, if you like the way that I like to mix drums, um, I will I will. Sometimes I'll separate them onto their own channels. They own tracks, and, um, you can actually expand, um, expend drum machine out in the mixer now, which is really handy, and you don't have to to isolate them as much. Um, sometimes I like to actually give each each drum sound its own place in the sequence there with its own mini clip. And what I found is that if I'm running a lot of drummer acts, it will start. I've had some problems with eating my cpu. Um, so, you know, you can you can definitely run several. I think that anything under ten these days should be fine, but it doesn't run as lightly as, you know, just a few samplers or maybe an impulse drum machine. Um, because it's holding up to one hundred twenty eight of those things, so, uh, yeah, drum racks are totally, totally awesome.

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