Ableton Forum

I'm in need of some help. I got a KORG padKontrol in hope that I can put together my own drum loops. I can't seem to get the two to talk. I setup the KORG in midi sync as:

Control Surface = padKontrol
Input = PadControl Port A
Output = PadKontrol CTRL

In Midi Ports section I have padKontrol as Track = On, Sync = OFF and Remote = On

I have a midi track in Ableton with a kit assigned, however, the pads do not respond when I hit them. In the Midi from I have the padKontrol Port A and ALL channels, though I am told the padKontrol should be set to ch 10, neither setting generates sound. I'd sure appreciate some help on getting this working. The Korg documentation wasn't much use.

check if you have loaded the correct scene on the padkontrol, just check the manual! or just use the midi assign for each loop inside impulse, the fastest way!

Yes, I have Scene 1 from the PK loaded. I am trying different drum racks, but the pads are not lining up. Occasionally I will hear a kick or a triangle.

If I select the midi mapper, I notice that the drums are not selectable. In other words if I have Phat Norman drum rack loaded up in Ableton, the kick and snare do not have the purple coloring so I can't even manually assign the 16 pads on the PK. I noted also that I have never got any snare sound from any pads on the PK, regardless what drum rack I load up.

Sounds silly, and i apologize if it seems slightly patronizing, but is the midi track armed or IN selected?
Gotta ask seeing as I know someone who called out a comp tech to come fix his computer screen, and the solution found was to plug the screen in at the wall. hahaha

Yes, the track was armed.

I made some better progress this morning after viewing the drum racks movie on the support page. It appears all one needs to do is drag Drum Rack onto the Midi Track, then assign the sound samples to each pad. Doing this and then selecting KIT-WIRED, I was able to make up some rhythms quite easily. What I am trying to nail down presently is if there are some standard sounding acoustic drum kits that I can simply drag onto the drum rack instead of manually picking the kick, snare etc.

drop a midi pitch plugin before the drum rack and it will transpose the whole PK into the range of your drum sounds at the touch of a dial.

gstockton wrote:Yes, I have Scene 1 from the PK loaded. I am trying different drum racks, but the pads are not lining up. Occasionally I will hear a kick or a triangle.

because drumracks are set up differently (and often have more than 16 sounds), there is no foolproof single PK scene that will automatically map in the way you want...

however, it will help if you try using the General MIDI (GM) scenes on your PK, since a lot of drumracks vaguely use the GM standard for pad mapping... the PK software comes with more GM scenes that you can upload with the Editor Librarian thingy too...

the last comment is not true. if you have factory scene 1 selected, and have not tweaked it in some weird way, the 16 pK pads automatically correspond to the 16 Drum Rack pads that are currently highlighted by the little black square. do a search, this comes up quite a bit...you might need to reset to factory settings or something, but it does work! if you want pre-made drum kits, there is Session Drums, also Puremagnetik, Track Team, Covert Ops and others have nice stuff to buy. Doesn't Drum Racks come with some presets?

ah, is that how it is supposed to work if you have the PK set up as a control surface in the Live prefs? so if you shift the black square, the pads follow? i'll have to try it later...

I'm having a different issue with PadKontrol.

all pads respond and all... but... it all appears to be transposed one octave?

For example, I will have a scene in a pad is assigned to C2, yet when played it appears as C1.

This is also happening with Logic, and using a variety of scene sets. So I'm assuming there's something in the PadKontrol that I'm missing. Any help?

aqua_tek wrote:I'm having a different issue with PadKontrol.

all pads respond and all... but... it all appears to be transposed one octave?

For example, I will have a scene in a pad is assigned to C2, yet when played it appears as C1.

This is also happening with Logic, and using a variety of scene sets. So I'm assuming there's something in the PadKontrol that I'm missing. Any help?

ive got the same problem

I'm pretty sure that C1, C2, C3 are all arbitrary. what they're really sending and receiving is a note number between 0 and 128 (just over 10 octaves.) how they're labeled is up to the manufacturer.

actually they aren't arbitrary... C3 is middle C on a piano, etc...

Tone Deft wrote:I'm pretty sure that C1, C2, C3 are all arbitrary. what they're really sending and receiving is a note number between 0 and 128 (just over 10 octaves.) how they're labeled is up to the manufacturer.

yup, depends if they are using the 'roland scale' middle= C3 or 'yamaha scale' middle= C4

try to check in the PadKONTROL editor... i manually set up all my scales there.

ah, i eat my words! turns out the ANSI standard for middle C (note# 60) is actually C4, but some manufacturers use C3...