Creating Drum Racks Before or After Writing

[penguinpajamas]

Hey guys! So I'm curious as to any input you may have to this. Lately, I've been finding that, when I'm writing, the process of finding and altering drum samples to fit a song is really disrupting my workflow, as it feels rather separate to the rest of the song. I end up spending so much time doing this that my workflow suffers greatly. On the other hand, I've found that trying to build a drum rack with samples that fit well together prior to writing can be effective, but I often have trouble implementing these pre-made drum racks into my songs, as they may not fit. I was wondering what you guys thought about this and if you had any advice for me as to how I can improve my workflow in this area.

Thanks,
Charlie

[TYLRbass]

Do a search for "128's" and see if that helps with your workflow.. It takes time to set up, but the idea is that once you build a library of them you can flip through drum sounds quickly and even while your MIDI pattern is playing which is nice.

[Dragonbreath]

I have yet to impletement this myself, but I think what people call 128's is what you need.

Essentially you have an instrument rack with multiple simplers sounds (up to 128, hence the name)so one can have up to 128 kicks on one pad then use the chain selector to quickly browse trough the different kicks.

So load up some "128's" for each element of the kick,
then you can quickly find the right sound for the song.

[penguinpajamas]

I didn't know they were called 128's but I've actually messed around with thee before. My main problem was that having a drum rack with 128 samples for each slot was really straining my CPU and was making Ableton really unstable. Have you ever had this problem? I've been messing around with similar ideas though. I hadn't tried dividing kicks up in different elements though so I'll have to try that out.

[Evengy]

I didn't know they were called 128's but I've actually messed around with thee before. My main problem was that having a drum rack with 128 samples for each slot was really straining my CPU and was making Ableton really unstable. Have you ever had this problem? I've been messing around with similar ideas though. I hadn't tried dividing kicks up in different elements though so I'll have to try that out.

there is a performance bug! the gui is slowing down and i get glitches etc. but they will fix it.
im also using 128´s and it is THAT thing for good sounding drums which complement each other!

[TYLRbass]

I didn't know they were called 128's but I've actually messed around with thee before. My main problem was that having a drum rack with 128 samples for each slot was really straining my CPU and was making Ableton really unstable. Have you ever had this problem? I've been messing around with similar ideas though. I hadn't tried dividing kicks up in different elements though so I'll have to try that out.

My problem wasn't with CPU it was with project size, when I did "Collect All and Save" I would end up with hundreds and hundreds of samples when I'm only actually using a handful of them in the project. That shit adds up quick..

[penguinpajamas]

My current approach has been making drum racks that are filled a given type of drum sample, so I essentially have a Launchpad where each button is a kick drum, and that's been allowing me to audition and compare sounds reasonably well. Once I've found a sound, I'll typically just drag it to a fresh drum rack and delete the loaded one from my set.