Session Drums, does anyone understand them?

[Angstrom]

I love session drums, but I do not understand them at all and they are a real nightmare to work with.
Here's a really simple example ...

Make an empty drum rack in a midi track
Now, drag ANY Session drums Hi-Hat folder onto the drumrack pads (like we are supposed to do)

Now look at what we get, The choke groups on the greyed racks won't work, and the others will.
I can see that changing the incoming note acceptance will alter things, but these are the factory presets .. what are they trying to tell me?
Why exactly are these valid presets?

EG: this preset "Hihat-Pa13-Multirod", this is how it loads up.



the top 3 drums here (and the bottom one) will not choke with the other hats, hence the grey choke selector.
Is there anyone out there who can actually figure out how these presets are meant to be used?
Or are they actually wrong?

here's another one, from the stereo kits this time. This is the preset "Hihat-OldSchool-Stick"


this time they are all grey, none of them will accept choke grouping.

[longjohns]

sorry for the necro

this is a valid point, no responses

I assume it is some sort of oversight or possibly even laziness in the content development.

they must be pulled from functional kits, and the functionality broken by the idiosyncracies of drum racks???

as noted, it all works fine if you manually switch the routing around.

[alex.the.forge]

+1

also really compounds the biggest oversight with Live's content which IMO is the fact that there is no way to preview

Latin Percussion has really made this stand out to me - it seems totally impractical to have to load the entire Latin perc kit

so in addition to the situation described above you have no option but to load these things in order to listen to them in the first place, at which point you might decide that it is not the one you want

I only hope it's just another one of those "on the list, just not put in yet" things and not a fundamental flaw in the way it is designed

with Live's drums I often don't bother trying to put individual hits into drum racks, I just give them their own tracks (esp now we have group tracks)

I'll often start with a Kit, then once I've built a basic pattern I'll "extract chains" and then if I want to change the sound I'll use the hotswap button

works fine for drum machines and the stereo mic session drums, but not so well for Latin percussion or multi-mic session drums

[alex.the.forge]

I just had to bump this because I've been really getting into more latinney tribal house of late and I just loaded up Live feeling all inspired to go to the latin percussion folder and I took one look at instruments>drum racks>latin percussion and instantly deflated

maybe it's just because it's still pretty sluggish to work with a full kit that I really notice it on that pack, but really it is quite amazing to not be able to preview before you load - the only option is to find he live clips and wait about 30 seconds for them to preview

I think this comes under the browser issue - where I think all 3 of us have at some point agreed that Live needs some kind of browser overhaul to allow for things like program change akin to the NI ones among others

I think these broader issues have a lot to do with the session drums confusion - if it was easier to find what you want in the first place then you wouldn't need to mess with the drum rack so much

[Schuft]

+1

same issue with not being possible to preview latin percussion elements.

[Birdy]

+1

[yearlongyeti]

Cant you just hot swap, seems to work pretty quick

[Jekblad]

although i don't miss reason drums, session drums has made for some angry "live is supposed to be FUN!!! WTF I KILL GERHARD" moments.

yes i understand them. i understand that they don't make any sense.

[Electronathan]

I'm going through right now what the OP has mentioned. It's crazy that If you want to build a drum rack from scratch - in my case, an 808 kick from Drum Machines, a hi hat preset folder from session drums – it's one of the most tedious, program intensive tasks I've ever had to deal with in Live! I have to manually assign the choke groups for the hi-hats (and I hate that 128GM menu that pops out). Then I have to group the pads together so the mixer isn't just one long stream of channels which compounds the chock group issue. I also needed some Latin Percussion samples too, but this is slowing me down big time.

I don't see why a preset folder can't show up as a subgroup (like any other Live Drum Rack preset) with the chock assignments ready to go.

Perhaps my workflow is not what Ableton had in mind with mixing & matching drum samples? If there's a better way to do it, I want to know. If Ableton can further develop how loading presets behaves that'd be great though.

[Jekblad]

a lot of time i just want to drop an addition sample onto the drum rack, sharing a pad with the snare.

So layering two snares together as a chain, then using a simple delay to delay that clap just a bit. Now you have a nice fat layered drum bit, but your fun is ruined because you have wade through that freakin 128 gm midi menu every time.

That menu shouldn't save with the preset, it should detect the pad it's been dropped on.

[Angstrom]

it's one of the most tedious, program intensive tasks I've ever had to deal with in Live!

<snip>

Perhaps my workflow is not what Ableton had in mind with mixing & matching drum samples? If there's a better way to do it, I want to know. If Ableton can further develop how loading presets behaves that'd be great though.

me too, every day pretty much.

the non-preview system makes creating a drumkit like looking for a needle in a haystack, at night with a blindfold, and the haystack has 200 needles in and you need the light purple one.

the voice/chain/group assignments on the presets are so ridiculous as to actually make me laugh as I spend my customary hour fixing the one I finally select. Typically a preset of hi-hats will have choke groups set on some, but un selectable on others due to those chains being nested a further level.

I think whoever made these presets ought to step forward and explain the methodology.
Do we simply need to get as drunk as they were, if we are to use them?

example: (once again, incase you missed it)

[Electronathan]

Oi.
I was just building a mix n' match type kit and it was going pretty well. Started out with a stereo kit, added in a couple claps, switched out kicks and snares from other presets. There wasn't any work involved like there would be starting with an empty rack. Then I dropped in a multimic tom preset folder.... that wasn't so elegant. None of the Overhead, Room I/O stuff was added in and manually doing it just isn't worth it anyway. But I am a little disappointed.
It's bummer not having Drum Racks being more adaptable / open-ended in these scenarios.

Hmmm... time to talk this up in the feature request forum I suppose.

[longjohns]

to get them all to choke, you have to set specific notes in the top rack, and change the input note in the inner racks

give me 10 points

then when having to do all this annoying routing, i can at least console myself with my points

[Angstrom]

hmm, yes nearly, but I can only give you 5 points there.

anyone else from the opposing team?

OK, here's the full answer. To get the drumrack preset hihats to choke here's what you do:

1. you must understand that you must press the IO on the parent drumrack so you can see the notes(if they aren't currently shown)
2. now open up one of the problematic subracks and press the marble button that looks like 3 horizontal lines
3. press the IO button for the now visible subchain list
4. make a note of the first note name you see. In this case it's A#1
5. go to the parent and set the hi-at chain incoming note (with the worlds largest pulldown) to A#1
6. go back to the sub rack and set the incoming note (with the worlds largest pulldown) to 'all notes'
7. set the parent choke group to 1, no that it is selectable

now simply repeat steps 2-7 for the other 6 drum chains and you are ready to begin hearing the drums.
So, in just 36 simple steps you can get the factory preset to work correctly.

you see? Ableton presets are easy to work with.
Now, how do you fancy changing your mind and 'flipping' to a new hi-hat preset and repeating the process?

wheee!!

[porfiry]

It's a little telling that no Ableton people stop into this thread, unlike the generic "8 crashes all the time" ones. Don't hold your breath for a complete reformat of the preset surfing system.

Don't even get me started on the possibility of dragging two instances of the same drum into a rack and having them play correctly.