Ableton Forum

I want to expand my drum kit by creating my own samples and trigger them via drum triggers. Stand alone hardware samplers can do this, but you can not create your own samples. Live seems to give you much more control. I would have a laptop with a midi interface with two to three drum pads that i could hit and trigger my own samples.In addition to my acoustic kit. Not just percussion and such but i want explosions and thunder and all sorts of sounds. I have been searching for the perfect way of implementing this and Live looks promising but I am not sure if I completely understand the program yet. And I don't want to buy it if I can't use it. Any Advice would be tremendously appreciated.

You can drop different samples (WAV or AIFF) into a Track column.

When you double-click on the sample object, you can turn the Loop button off.

This button is in the Track Information block at the bottom-left corner of the canvas.

Turning off Looping means that when the sample is triggered, it will only play once.

(You can also adjust whether a trigger overlaps or is discrete, if triggers are hit before the sample is finished playing.)

You can then map MIDI messages that come from your drum pad to the Start object for that Track.

Then you can go crazy on the skins, with each Track played once, as you hit elements on the drum pad.

Download the demo and check it out.

-Alex

Thanks for you rreply. I am going to download the demo right now and give it a go. It sounds like I will be able to do just what I envision.

Thanks again

keep in mind that live is made specificaly for loops, not for hits. because of this, live will automaticaly strech any sample you put into it to fit the current tempo, and there's little you can do about it short of futzing with the transient and length settings. there has been a pretty loud cry for a 'timestretch bypass' button for individual sounds, so i think it's reasonable to assume that it will be included in version 2.

k

On the other hand, it's not the end of the world. A minute or two of tuning of each sample to its original state can help as a stopgap, at least until Ableton provides this feature.

-Alex

i've done it. the ableton CD comes with a metric shitload of free samples and a ton of single hits. i put one on each track and triggered them with a KAT drum pad thingy. worked well. a better way to do it is with Reason and the NNXT sampler because you can have multisamples on each trigger. like one for a soft hit and one for a hard hit etc. you can get pretty expressive and realistic drums that way.

Another good source of samples is Computer Music magazine, a Brit publication which you can find in most bookstores, e.g. Borders.

A bit pricey, and they are annoyingly PC-centric, but they glue a CD full of royalty-free samples to the mag.

Most of the files suck but there a few that are magic, when you to sort through them.

-Alex

The only dilemma with treating samples like clips is that you cant record loops easily live, without being in LOOP mode.

I have just been working on this problem, Im using a tascam us428 and mac osx on a pbook

there are a few great little sample players, like vsamp, or even little soundfont players like simplesynth

the problem is that I want to record the sound out as a loop.

The only way to do this is to use rewire (although I REALLY am looking for some way to totally re-route audio in X, like a patch bay which would let me route the output of any program into live. And I need live to support the audio structure.

anyway, I use reason demo, setting up midi routing to also go to reason. You can make reason act like a pile of hardware plugged into your midi. After 20 mins, the program tells me time is up, but doesn't quit the midi in possibilities. So now I can run live, and do drum patterns which I can monitor and record in LIVE.

you could try that, I don't know if reason works the same on a PC if you have one of those.

If you don't need to make those loops in a live situation (eg studio loop building) then the clips method will work fine.

All the best!

I recently saw the Flecktones perform and FutureMan has been playing with drum-triggers for long time. He seems to be using Gigasampler.(He actually had someone on the side of the stage running the prog. for him...)

I don't have any experience with the program myself, but from what I understand it might be more suited for what your looking to do...?
might be worth checkin.

Thank you for all the advice. I Use a MAC, and I have a tascam us-428. I really only work with digital audio so midi is a bit new. I use BIAS Deck for all my multi tracking. Gigasampler sounds interesting and I don't think Reason will do what I want. It sounds like if I could bypass the automatic time stretch Live would work.

Thanks for all the great advice