nudging drum hits for that loose and live sound

[lozoz]

apologies if this has already been covered somewhere else as i'm sure it has but i couldn't find it.

i'm looking to get much looser and live sounding drum patterns within ableton. if i try to nudge drum hits left and right they always snap to the grid. is there any way to avoid this in order to make minor timing alterations to individual hits?

thanks very much.

[xherv]

Two options:

* Cmd+Click (I'm assuming Ctrl+Click on PC/Windows) when resizing a MIDI note doesn't snap
* Cmd+4 (Ctrl+4) turns snapping off on the grid, so you can shuffle notes around without snapping

In Live 8, 'grooves' are really steroids for this kind of thing.

[lozoz]

perfect. thank you!

what did you mean by the 'steroid' thing in Live 8?

[xherv]

You'd probably have to read the L8 manual to get a comprehensive discussion, but basically grooves transform the timing of a clip the same way 'swing' does - only it's based on a short MIDI (or audio) clip. So if you have a 'groove' that's got some lazy snares on 2/4, but some tricky hats on top of that on 16th notes, you can just apply that 'groove' to any other clip. E.G. a MIDI clip for a drum rack with entirely different sounds. There is enough control that you can modulate exactly how much the timing is modified, or what beat grid is quantized, things like that. It also does things similar to timing with velocity.

And of course you can change the underlying 'groove' clip, so instead of micro-managing every note in every MIDI clip on a track, you can just attack it on a more conceptual, global level.

I haven't begun to explore it enough but it's a really great tool for this domain of very subtle modulations that adds such a great amount of feel to percussion (and other content too, I'm sure).

[TroyP]

Two things I learned recently:

1. Click a MIDI note and hold. Then press Alt (don't know what it is on a Mac). Then, you can drag without the clip snapping to the quantize grid.

2. Add the Velocity MIDI effect to the chain (not Random, like I thought). Set to really really low values and a narrow out range. This, plus the variations you're doing can really help.

I agree that Groove Templates will be awesome.