How Do You Setup Your Drums?

[H20nly]

*bookmark* - good info here gents.


which drums i use depend on how big of a hurry i'm in... if i'm putzing around and experimenting then i use Live's drum racks. if i'm in a hurry... as in guitar player sitting in studio ready to make music NOW... i use FL Studio drums. i got a world samples DVD when i bought FL 5 and that sample pack has been more than enough to make some drums over the years. i get it right with FL re-wired to Live then mix it down from FL to a .ogg file and ditch the re-wire slave. i import that track to Live. from there i'll add effects (if still needed) and add some percussion or other sounds that Live has available.

[matthews]

You asking for a few different things here in regards to how drumRacks work.
ALSO, what are you using to trigger the "Selected," a drum pad or the same keys on the keyboard?

It takes tricky routing to play all your keyboard keys across kicks, AND have a selection for kicks.

If you drop in a default drumRack and play your keyboard you will see all the cells lighting up.
The default for drumRack is that behavior.
I suggest working this way if you want NO HASSLE play across keys, and keep it simple by filling up the cells.


There are I/O settings you can change this behavior buy setting what notes trigger each cell, "ALL NOTES" is one of the settings.
Now if you nest a drumRack in a drumRack, you can layer this behavior.
Input "ALL NOTES" on the host rack, and select individual inputs for the nested rack.
You can play with those and try to figure out something that might work.

Using blank MIDI TRACKS to recieve keys from your key board on different midi channels and using the MIDI TO menu and sub menues, is something else to look into.

Using the MidiEffect pitch, before a Sampler will let you select samples spread out over the "key zone" instead of the chain selection.

Somewhere in those combinations of things you can find a solution or workaround.

Thanks for the reply

Yeah I've been doing it the "standard way" in regards to just filling up cells, as well as utilizing the chain select method. It's not bad and I've been happy with the results.

Ultimitely though, I'd love to figure out a way of achieving a "select" option with just a sampler, without using the drum rack. I think I'm only really using a drum rack because it has a macro option built in, so it makes mapping the "select" parameter simple. However, I'd love to be able to drop 127 kicks into a sampler, so each sample plays its original pitch at C3 and deviates accordingly when I move up or down the keyboard, AND have a macro knob in the same "rack" as well. This way I can easily audition different samples and be able to "play" that sound as well, all in one single rack. Essentially I want the Sampler to function as it's suppose to, just have a macro attatched inside a rack. I guess this type of functionality isn't that easy to achieve?

Edit: Can I possibly drop a sampler into an instrument rack? Not in front of a computer so I can't check, but shouldn't I be able to map the chain select to a macro to get this functionality?

[JuanSOLO]

On my way home I was thinking you could...

Drop in a drumRack,
put a "pitch midi effect" on a cell, put a kick sampler on that same cell
select both (highlight both title bars) , of the Pitch and Sampler, right click, choose Group to DrumRack.
In the main host DrumRack choose a 'specific note' for the midi I/O input on that cell/chain
On the nested DrumRack, choose "ALL NOTES" for the I/O midi input on that chain
Find the sampler and drag your kicks in, go to the top of the 'key zone' editors bar right click, choose "distribute ranges equally"
Now on the nested DrumRack macros map the pitch knob to one of the Macros, and adjust the value from 0 to 127.
Now that macro will allow for selecting what will play when that particular cell is activated.
You should be able to create another MIDI TRACK and in the MIDI TO Options set it to the DrumRack's TRACK, and set the sub menu directly to that nested DrumRack.
Now anything coming into the MIDI Track (like your keyboard) should bypass the drumRack and go directly to the nested drumRack allowing for all the keys to play.

now that I think about it that will probably not work, because the pitch is in the way, but it's off the top of my head, and it should give you a few ideas.

YOU COULD
not use the drumRack and group the Sampler to an Instrument Rack as you had mentioned.

I guess the thing that trips me up about all of this is the actual keyboard coming in where the keys play all of the kicks. If the keys play all of the kicks, then what are you selecting with a Macro? There is a redundancy you are asking for here, see?

Lets say you have drumPads on your keyboard too, then maybe it would make since about what you were selecting. So you'd have to do something like assign the drumPad so it plays the cell, or sampler, and set the keyboard keys on a different midi channel for each different hit.
Use some kind of MIDI TRACK in routing and the I/O setting to get what your after.

As I said before, how do you intend to use the "across keys" in tandem with a "selection knob"

There is a $12 drumRack from Puremagnetik called "Trap Kit"
It's a multi sampled acoustic kit that sounds REALLY GOOD. Wether you like it or not, it's worth the 12 buck just to learn what drumRacks are capable of.

[matthews]

YOU COULD
not use the drumRack and group the Sampler to an Instrument Rack as you had mentioned.

I guess the thing that trips me up about all of this is the actual keyboard coming in where the keys play all of the kicks. If the keys play all of the kicks, then what are you selecting with a Macro? There is a redundancy you are asking for here, see?

Would the keys play all the kicks though? Because that's not I want. I may not be thinking this through correctly. If I have the chain select on 1, and I play C3, that's the original sample pitch of the sample assigned to chain step 1. If I play D3, its still that same sample, just pitched higher. The actual sample doesn't change. Or does it? I'm thinking it'll only change if I move the corresponding macro knob assigned to the chain select. Ideally I would do this with toms as well, that way I can go through the 'select' macro until I find a sample I like, and then actually be able to play a melody with it. With the drum rack method, you're not able to really "play" the samples that it's using, they function as one shots like a typical drum rack should, you lose the sampler functionality. Will give this a go when I get home and see if it functions the way I'm hoping it will. No doubt I'll run into a snag lol

[JuanSOLO]

I'm not one to really say, you should do it this way or that way, yet I have been around the block with the old drumRack/Sampler tricks.

There are a lot of options!
Try not to get too hung up on specifics of workflow.
Play with some variations, try to get what your after, but most importantly, TEST STUFF as you go.
I have built countless variation in this subject only to realize I resort to the simplest of things and make more music that way.