18 Game-Changing Ableton Live Drum Rack Tips

hey guys it's will from EDM tips today I want to share with you 18 of the most powerful Ableton drum wrap techniques you can use to get the most from your Productions make sure you watch to the end if you want to see the ones that I use in every single project I start so let's get straight to it so first let's look at simply loading in a drum rack if you create a midi channel in Ableton Live either by going up to the menu or holding command shift and T if you're using Mac then go into your instruments and you can just drag in a drum rack boom I use this device for every track it's super powerful so here's how you use it now there are lots of drum kits already provided with Ableton that you can just drag in and start using straight away and we can see here that each one is loaded on a different pad or the way I personally prefer to use the drum rack is to load in my own single shot samples and you do that simply by browsing to your samples within the Ableton browser and then you can just drag and drop separate samples onto each different pad and then you're going to be able to play them but that's simple and basic so first Power technique I want to show you is using send and return so we can see here I've got some drums loaded into different pads and if I want to use for example the same Reverb on multiple elements I don't want to have to create a separate Reverb for each one of these different chains so that's when I'm going to use a return Reverb now you've got two options when it comes to the drum rack you can either send and return to your Global auxiliary channels which aren't just within the drum rack for your entire project or you can create a dedicated return within the drum rack itself so I'm going to show you both of those techniques and describe the benefits of each so if we press this routing button here and this R button here for return we've got this area that pops up now if we want to create a return chain within the drum rack we can just hit that button there and then we can drop an hour effect here so I'm going to drop in a Reverb and I'm going to turn it to 100 wet so we don't double up the dry signal when we send these separate drums out to this Reverb and you have to make sure this S button is pressed and that's send and you can close down the R button and the routing and this send control now shows so if we want to send a little bit of that Rim shot out to the Reverb we can do that we can also send some of that Shaker out differing amounts to our taste so let's just listen to that some of the tambourine and it's all going to our return Reverb here now that's useful because if you put an effect after this entire drum rack it's going to also affect this Reverb as well so perhaps you want to compress your drums perhaps you want to filter out the high end and that's all going to be done to this return Reverb as well now the second technique is as I said to send out to your Global auxiliary channels so let's just delete this one right click create return chain and then I'm going to open up this routing button and it then I'm going to select from this drop down menu one of the auxiliary channels I've already set up so I'm going to choose this auxiliary room Reverb One and then I'm going to create a second one and I'm going to choose this whole Reverb which is the second auxiliary channel in my project so we can close down the routing and the R button again so we've just got the two send controls but if we do this and then start putting effect after our drum rack this has already been sent out to this auxiliary channel so for example if we put a filter on these drums we're still going to be able to hear what's been sent out to this Reverb [Music] so we can hear that still because it's being sent out before it hits the filter now the benefit of this is you can have multiple elements of your mix share the same effects and that can be quite good to gel everything together and make it sound like it's coming from one space now the other thing I like to do when it comes to sending returns within drumrack is actually automate these send controls for example if we want this Rim shot to send out to the whole Reverb every few shots like that it can be a nice effect to add more interest to your track in that case I'm going to go show Automation in new lane and then I'm going to program it in within the arrangement View [Music] like so second tip I want to show you is easily layering samples so if we've got this Rim shot if we want to layer that up with a clap an easy way we can do that within the drum rack is to find a clap sound Let's Go drum hit claps choose a clap we like drag that into a new pad and we want to have that triggered by the same note within our drum rack so we can see here this is our Rim shot and what we want to do is open up this routing button and we can see this receive and play and choke controls we'll get to these other ones a bit later but at the moment we can see that this is C1 that's what that is assigned to so if we go down to our clap and simply choose C1 every time that C1 note is being hit it's going to actually play both sounds at the same time as we can hear now [Music] and if we delete this note it's going to play neither of them and then we can just mix this clap in to be the right volume next tip I want to show you is adjusting the timing because sometimes you might want your claps to not all play at exactly the same time now unfortunately you can't bring this forwards by a few milliseconds but what you can do is push one of them back a few milliseconds and the way you do that is by using a delay unit so I'm just going to load a delay over our clap I'm going to put it to 100 wet I'm going to take the feedback right down I'll take off the synchronization and then we are going to just make this a very short millisecond delay which is going to play slightly after our Rim shot [Music] so we can hear it just gives it a bit more of a human feel by just delaying the Clap by a few milliseconds and you can tighten it up if you want just a little tip there next I want to touch upon drum grouping and that's where you can combine a couple of drum sounds into one group so you can process them as one so I'm just going to grab these two Tom drum sounds these two I'm going to commands G to group them together and then we can see they've been put into their own drum rack within a drum rack I'm just going to rename this by pressing command and R and calling this Toms in capital letters so I know it's a group and we can recolor that as well to be show up for us that it's a group now we can see we've got these two Tom drums within that group now the beauty of that is if I want to process them both together I could put for example a Reverb over both of them so let's just pop one here at the end of that chain it's important I don't put it here because that would just be affecting this one Tom drum or here which would just be affecting the other Tom drum it's important I put it at the end of the chain as I have done so it's going to affect both so now let's listen to these Tom drums let's just Loop this a little bit and I can make this louder this chain so now these are being processed together as one we can pan them left all right so that's drum grouping very useful indeed now I'm going to show you a trick as to how you can randomize samples again to add some more human feeling so I'm going to create a midi Channel I'm going to drag in a new drum rack and I want the claps to be randomized as we're playing this through and you can see I've just loaded in three separate drum sounds for claps that I want to randomize so what I'm going to do is just program them in in a new midi Channel by pressing command shift and M or control shift and M if you're using Windows and let's program one in on every other kick and we're just going to repeat that so at the moment all three of these drums will sound at the same time like so we just want to play one at a time and have it randomized each time so this is how you do it within the midi effects you choose arpeggiator we'll pop that down there and all you need to do is make sure that this rate is a multiple of the frequency that these hit at so at the moment we've got 1 8 which is absolutely fine because these are hitting one four and then if we choose random other from the style drop down menu it's just going to play One Clap at once but it's going to randomize each time so let's have a look at that foreign and that's quite good for adding randomization it means we don't have to program it in it's all done automatically so if we play that with our other drums [Music] just adding a little bit more interest and variation which takes me on to the next tip panning randomization so we've already got the different samples playing now we want to randomize how their pans left and right so if we open up the chains here we can see what's going on at the moment we can pan them manually like so as I said we want to randomize this so let's put them all back to Center and the first sample we are going to hit controls and then just increase this random panning amount here until it put it up to 50 which is the amount it's going to randomly pan and then this goes on to our next tip as well and that's how you can make a change on one of your pads and have it copied to the other ones rather than clicking in each one and making that change manually we can just right click and then we can hit copy value to siblings and that works for any value or any parameter that you decide to edit and if we go to the other ones we can see that's been done to all of them now that's a fantastic tip and now let's listen to the panning randomization foreign [Music] so we might think okay that's a bit much I'm going to take this down to 20 probably to all siblings and now they're just panning a little bit left and right next tip I want to show you is a great way to add more power and punch to your drums and that's by layering the same drum one octave above which is going to add more punch it's going to add more high frequencies so if we've got this military kind of drum that we're going to use for an intro for example to that the way that we could do that is before the actual sampler or simpler within the chain we can just drag one of these midi effects chords in front we need to make sure that how simpler is set to classic mode and that we've got at least two voices playing so it's going to play a chord at that point now we can shift this first shift up by 12 semitones which is an octave and then we can just mix in that one octave above and this is the kind of effect that we can get so now we can hear the higher octave as well so that's a great way to add more punch to your drums now I've got another eight even more powerful tips for you but if you've got any questions on these so far do please let me know in the comments and I'll see if I can answer them and clear things up okay so next tip I'm going to show you is using choke groups and this is particularly useful when you want particular drum sound to cut off the end of another drum sound so for example if you were using a hi-hat in a real drum kit you could only have it playing closed or open so if you're playing the open hat and you wanted to play a closed one that closed one would necessarily cut off the end of the open one so the way that we can do that within ableton's drum rack is if we open up this routing button here again and I've got a closed hat for example and an open hat this choke group here is where you select it so as long as they're both in the same group so let's choose group one and group one for both the closed hat and the open hat now if we play one of these it's going to cut off the previous one so let's program in an example of how that might work we're going to go on to 16ths and we're going to go like so let's just increase the volume with the velocity so if we do this in fact we don't even need to program the whole thing because there's some release on the sound you can hear if we just put another one really quickly after this open hat you can hear that it actually cuts off that open hat so let's program this in and we're just going to Loop this little bit and turn off the other drums so we can really hear what's happening um here we go and if we take these out we'll hear these hats will last a lot longer foreign and that's a great way to keep your drums tight and to stop having too much build up in your drums next tip I want to show you is a simple one but really important especially when it comes to hi-hats and to Tom drums and that's tuning the drums so if we go into our Tom drums again let's just turn off the Reverb at the moment so we can hear them you can hear they're hitting different notes now if we go into the simpler itself we can just use this transpose button to make sure they're hitting the right note for our track so we can see here I've actually tuned it up one entire octave and getting your Tom drums tuned to the root of your track is really important because there's a lot of low frequency in there and it can just make things gel together so much better so let's listen to it when they're not tuned in I'm just going to randomly change the transposing of the Tom drums and play it with our Bass it just doesn't work nearly as well so using this transpose control for things like shakers hi-hats and Tom drums is fantastic but what happens if you want to actually have an increasing pitch Bend like for example with a snare intro at the end of a bar well if you were to do it the normal way within Ableton that is to go to your envelopes and then choose midi control pitch Bend it's going to bend up all of the drums which probably isn't what you want so if you are using drumrack the easiest thing to do is just create a separate one completely where you can have your snare rolls on and then you can use the smooth pitch Bend if you don't want to do that and you want to do it actually within one drum rack you'll have to use the transpose feature so if we go to our snares and we just program in a little drum roll like so so we have our drum roll now if we want that to go up in Pitch we're going to have to automate the transpose feature within that single sound so we can go into controls we can right click on transpose and we can show Automation in new Lane and that's going to allow us to just automate that one sound I have to open it up a bit so we can see what's going on it's going to default to zero and then we can just program in that pitch Bend like so but it's worth noting it's only going to be transposing it up a semitone each time instead of really smooth pitch curve but it's usually fine for drums now when it comes to presets and defaults we already touched on at the beginning of this tutorial that all of the different drum presets and default racks that we have that we can just drag in and start using right away but you can also create your own custom ones and save those as default for example this is my own personal default drum rack and we can see it's already got certain pads loaded in and named as well as certain effects so we've got a clap snare EQ where we're just taking out the low end we've got one for the open hats as well taking out the low end and then another for the 16th hat with a sidechain compressor already put in now I know every time I load up the drum rack this is what I'm going to use every time we can see we've also got the auxiliary Reverb already rooted in and it just saves so much time and the easy thing to do or the simple thing to do is once you've created a drum rack that you like you just hit this button here and then you can call it girls default drums or drum rack and now every time I load that in it's going to look exactly like this and if you want to make it the default so that when you load in any drum rack whatsoever you can right click and you can press save as default preset and it's going to load it in every time which can save minutes every time you start a project if at some point you decide that you don't want that to be the default you'll have to go into the defaults within your file system and just delete it and it's going to return it to the initial Factory preset now these are a couple of techniques I use in every single project that I use and it's a way of hot swapping so you can preview different sounds whilst you're listening to everything that already exists to try and find the best sound so the first I want to show is the pad hot swap so if we click on one of the sounds we can see this little button pops up here and that allows us to hot swap different pads into place and preview them whilst we're listening to everything else so let's try that let's just loop our drums hit hot swap and it's gonna load in different sounds until we find one that we think sounds pretty good that sounds pretty cool but if we want to tweak this a bit to give it a slightly smoother attack every time we hot Swap this it's going to go back to the default settings so the second hot swap tool and the one I personally use the most is to actually go within the simpler itself and hot swap there instead of in the pad because then all of the sample settings you've done if you've done any transposing if you've done any volume all of that saved and it's just the sample itself that switches out so we can hit it there and now try some other sounds and I'm having to press return each time to load them in but we can see we've already still got those same settings for the attack and I literally will do that for every drum sound in every track I make making sure that I find the best possible sound and I make notes of maybe five or six and then I'll a B test them against each other whittling out the weaker sound each time until I'm left with the absolute best drum sound that I can choose for that track so this penultimate technique is almost like the last two but on steroids and that allows you to actually use one of these macro knobs to really quickly just preview loads of different sounds so the way that you do that is you open up the macro control here by pressing this button and we need to load a sampler not a simpler onto one of our cells so let's load this sampler on here onto C2 and then what we want to do is drag up to 128 of one particular drum sound so I'm going to do this with snares but you could also do this for cat cats you could also do this for kicks or shakers or any other sound so let's grab a bunch of snares 128 of them like so and we are just going to drag them in to this sampler now what we want to do is press this Zone button make sure the select button is hit and then we want to right click and distribute ranges equally and then we just need to right click here map to macro one sample selector and we can just call this snares and now when we program a snare in let's just close down the zone and program one of these snares in like so let's just copy that now we can just move this knob and just preview a lot of different ones really quickly now that's a super power tip but there's one more that I want to show you which I find so useful when it comes to drum racks you don't just have to use them for drums I love drum wrap for other samples as well so I've got one here that I just drag in to use for vinyl sounds if I want some vinyl sounds in the background of my track and I can very quickly just find one that's going to work and program that in I also have one for vocal hits as well which I love to use for little rhythmic effects so there you have it guys I hope you've enjoyed this tutorial on my most powerful drum rack techniques but the most important part of any electronic track at least is the kick drum now getting the wrong Kick Drum can seriously ruin a track and so often a student of mine will come to me with a track that just changing the kick drum makes all the difference it just pulls the track together so if you want to find out how to pick the perfect kick drum to underpin your track you can check that video there I hope you enjoyed this if you did consider subscribing to my channel and thank you so much for watching catch you over that next video

Channel: EDM Tips

Views: 35,465

Keywords: ableton drum rack, ableton drum rack tips, ableton drum racks, electronic drum rack, ableton live racks, drum racks ableton live 11, drum rack ableton live, custom drum racks, ableton drum rack sampler, ableton drum rack effects, all about drum rack, drum rack tutorial, drum rack walkthrough, do not use the drum rack in ableton until you watch this, what noone told you about ableton live drum rack, ableton live drum rack secrets, ableton live drum rack tutorial, EDM Tips

Id: MJ8fUDoHAQ8

Length: 21min 46sec (1306 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 19 2023