Ableton Forum

I have what I'm sure is a very stupid question. But I honestly have tried to figure this out myself before posting. I'm still quite new to Live and am forcing myself to use it more in depth than I ahve been to date.

When I create a MIDI clip that drives a VST drum machine, I would like the notes on the piano roll to be labeled with drum names instead of note names. For example, instead of C3, I would like it to say Kick.

I honestly have looked through the manual and even done some searching. I can't figure out how to do this...what I have to activate or how to present the instrument to Live so it activates this for me.

I thought I would use a drum rack and then rename each pad, but I'm not sure of the best way to use a Drum Rack to do this. It seems you drag an instrument onto each pad, but I really want one instrument played across the pads as different notes.

I want to do this with (uTonic) where each of the 8 "pads" in uTonic respond to a different MIDI note. I don't program the patterns in uTonic, I program them in MIDI clips from my MPD32. But it would be nice if I could label the piano roll appropriately.

Sorry for the long winded post. I'm just trying to give as much information as I can. Any help you could offer is truly appreciated.

Ack. I think I might have figured this out. Of course I wait to post it and as soon as I do I get an answer.

If I create a drum rack and drag one isntance of uTonic in the device area, shouldn't all the pads trigger the appropriate notes? I don't HAVE TO create an external instrument for each pad? Does dragging a different instrument or sample to each pad create a new chain?

Sorry, I'm just trying to get my head around the terminology...not used to having this much flexibility.

lowbias wrote:If I create a drum rack and drag one isntance of uTonic in the device area, shouldn't all the pads trigger the appropriate notes? I don't HAVE TO create an external instrument for each pad? Does dragging a different instrument or sample to each pad create a new chain?

I tried this yesterday with Battery but each pad does not trigger the all the pads in battery. Instead it only trigger the pad assiged to a single note. And draggin a diff inst/sample always creates a chain. As far as your OP, you have to manually rename the chains to relfect the text you want on the folded piano bar. Let me know if you get a different result with your expeeriment.

The solution I know is using a "MIDI Effect Rack" instead of a "Drum Rack". I have already described this in another post in this forum: http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=122640, third post. In fact, I also describe there how to remap the incoming MIDI notes, but as a side result you have the notes in the piano roll properly named (e.g., BD or Kick instead of C1).

HTH, Martin

tlennon, no you're right. I couldn't get it to behave the way I wanted it to.

But trommelmeister your idea is perfect. I'll implement it tonight and it should get me exactly what I was looking for. Sincere to you both for bothering to reply at all.