Ableton Forum

I don't really have any solutions but drum rack is kind of annoying to mix because when you export it, its just one track instead of separate drum stems. I know there's extract chains...but there should be a better way, right?

This is by far the biggest problem with Drum Rack. It is so clunky and makes processing drums painfully slow. Having the ability to make each drum sample have its own individual track for processing would help so much.

Tom:

If you go to Session View and look at the top of the channel with the Drum Rack (right where the channel name is) you should see a little arrow. When you click on that arrow it will unfold/reveal all of the Drum Rack cells as individual channel strips that you can then use to mix without contending with the cramped Drum Rack interface down in Device View. That should solve your issue.

Pie:

If you want to render Drum Rack cells as separate audio tracks you can solo them and then 'Render to Audio'. That will give you the same effect as rendering stems.

I personally render each stem one at a time (for quality control reasons), so soloing each Drum Rack cell and rendering one at a time isn't a big deal for me. But if you want to rely on Ableton's Render All Individual Tracks feature and still want your Drum Rack cells rendered as individual channels then try this:

Make a new, empty, MIDI track for each drum cell that you wish to be separated. Then click and drag the cell from the Drum Rack into the empty MIDI channel. Live should extract all of the MIDI data for that specific cell as well as any individual processing that you had on that cell and place it in the new MIDI channel. Repeat for each cell that you'd like to render separately.

my solution was to just use impulse and simpler channels and then group group them together with:

so i have kick, clap
and then a hat group inside the drum group.
There was a time where i had one drum rack for all drums and stuff, it is really compact, but on the hand very hard to see what was done, also yeah separating everything again requires extra time.

so back to group group stuff, which solved that problem from v9.

Yes, just expand in the mixer. There are also gain and pan controls, sends, and returns if you expand that portion of the rack.

One of the biggest reasons why I avoid Drum Rack. I was so excited to use it initially because I loved FL Studio's excellent step sequencer but after seeing how much of a pain it is to mix with I rarely use it.

You can always create a track, select the drum rack chain as an input, monitor to In, mute the drum rack chain.

Yes there are definitely improvements I'd like to see - I'd like a Send option for each sub track, so I can add reverb to the snare without also doing it to the kick. I know I can extract the sub track but it's a clunky work around.

Double Tap wrote: ↑

Thu May 13, 2021 8:13 am

Yes there are definitely improvements I'd like to see - I'd like a Send option for each sub track, so I can add reverb to the snare without also doing it to the kick. I know I can extract the sub track but it's a clunky work around.

Just open another drum rack? Or a sample track with the snare. Or sample the snare with the reverb and pit that in the drum rack. Lots of work arounds

Enable the rack sends and add return chains to the rack as required.

The Rabbits wrote: ↑

Fri May 14, 2021 12:46 am

Enable the rack sends and add return chains to the rack as required.

Ah, I didn't know you could do that. So you can create a separate send / return chain within the Drum Rack - thanks for pointing that out.

Perhaps they could make it a bit more obvious by adding an empty return to the default Drum Rack, so that when a beginner opens up the rack mixer, they would know there's an option to have something in there.

Yep. All racks have the option. I guess they don't add one by default because it would clutter up the Chain list and isn't always needed.

What I’d like most for the drum rack is to be able to expand it vertically as you can Sampler. Constantly scrolling about when you have a lot of drums is tedious.

I'd like the expansion option for all racks.

What I don't like about it is that when layering, you can't offset the layered samples easily. You either have to shift individual midi notes or use a delay plugin just to offset a few milliseconds. I think this is more about Simpler/Sampler since that's what the Drum Rack uses. It's pretty much a deal-breaker for me, so that's why I don't bother using Drum Rack. I mean, it's very rare to have layers all hit at the exact same time. It just sounds too thin. Nudging their offset a little bit fattens everything up (I've already posted feature enhancement for Simpler/Sampler). Other DAWS have had this feature for years.