Drum Racks

[Dylan Drazen]

Hi, everyone. First time, long time.

I have been making DJ mixes with Live for just over a year now, but haven't done a whole lot of producing with it. I'm slowly moving over from Logic. Let's see, I've done one remix in Live 8 so far. Went pretty smoothly. So while I know my basic way around Live 8, I'm still fairly new to working with instruments and MIDI.

I have a few very stupid questions about Drum Racks. I've discovered how easy it is to map multiple items across my entire keyboard by just dragging them to one cell. That part is super-duper easy and cool. Thanks Ableton! You rock. No more clunky Battery or Kontakt. I love all the ways you can tweak a sound and map the parameters to any of my knobs. It's all very inspiring. But, alas, with any new discovery, many questions often come up. And little annoyances too: like let me drag multiple samples from the Finder too, ok? If I don't use your own file browser, the cells aren't populated in any kind of logical order. What gives!

Anyway, I've read the sections in the manual about Drum Racks, and was not able to answer the following questions:

1. Can you warp a looped sample inside Drum Racks? Or is it best to simply grab that cell and drag it into a new audio clip in another track?

2. What if I want to play multiple notes of a sample mapped to one cell on my keyboard, such as a bass sound? I've tried all sorts of things to achieve this, but to no avail. I tried dragging it into Simpler, but my curser turns into the "not allowed" symbol. I tried dragging it into an empty Instrument Rack, and the sample does get moved (Indeed it does get moved! The original cell is deleted from Drum Racks), but the sample only plays from one note, and I can't figure out how to map that sample to my entire keyboard. Ok, maybe this is an RTFM right here but I figured there might be an even easier way to sort of branch one Drum Racks cell out to your entire keyboard if you wish to play it as individual notes instead of its one hit as assigned to the single cell, while staying inside of Drum Racks. Hmm?

3. I've been creating many of my own Drum Racks presets from sample libraries containing many short one shot samples. Because my "Imported" folder inside my Live8Library folder has been growing so much, I moved it to an external hd. Figured out how to do that just fine, but I'm noticing the number of files inside my "Imported" folder is getting huge! It's approaching 10,000. Is that ok? Will it slow anything down? I've only just gotten started. I read that Mac OS can handle more then 1 billion files inside one folder, but it still feels a little strange that I'm building an entire sample library inside of one folder, with no subdirectories, and that's the only way to do it. Am I mistaken?

Well, that's all I got for now. Thanks!

Dylan Drazen

[Dylan Drazen]

:: bump ::

anyone?

[longjohns]

1. no warping inside any ableton instrument

2. you can either set the drum rack chain's input to 'all' (and keep other sounds clear of the range which you want to play, or... yes, use an instrument rack instead. the note information can be set in the key/zone editor

3. i guess it is OK but if you want to organize things, better start sooner than later. having a huge 'imported' folder in your library means that you're doing everything by the 'export to library' in the file manager, right?

you could put samples wherever you want, in some organized way.. and the presets and sets would still know where they are. more work on the front end, but you'd have some hope of navigating it later on, as opposed to a folder with a billion files.

[longjohns]

2a. i guess it may also depend on the instrument which exists on that chain, whether setting the drum rack input to 'all' will generate different playback notes.

e.g. if a sampler was the instrument on that drum rack chain, it would need to have its zone settings configured so as to play different pitches across the key range. (not a sample sitting on a single note with it's range limited to just that note)