Ableton Forum

I am somewhat new to ableton, but not new to drums.
I have tinkered around with using my midi drums to trigger sounds in ableton.
Everything I have tried thus far has completely lacked the response of
acoustic and even my midi drums. no response and very little dynamics.

What I have tried is loading up a drum rack with various drum sounds from
the stock collection in ableton live, and some drum sounds from free cd's
included in recording magazines.

How can I use ableton with my midi drums and get the response and dynamics I need as a drummer?

Thanks!
Brian in Atlanta

You'll need to understand a bit about how MIDI works, but it's not complicated. Which MIDI drums are you using? I use a Roland TD-6 myself, so perhaps I can be of some help to you.

MIDI notes are sent with an accompanying velocity value which represents how hard you hit the drumhead. Most kits send this data along with the note when you strike the drumhead.

In fact, generally all the information that is sent is:
- Note number (0-127)
- Velocity value (0-127)
- MIDI Channel (0-15 but drums are channel 10 by default)
- Time it was hit (this isn't sent explicitly but the program knows when it was received)

So whatever device is receiving this information has only this to work with. In the case of drum racks, each note is passed down to a device in a slot corresponding to that note. It's actually a really clever system and I love it.

Now here's the kicker, and is probably what you're looking for... in the case of dropping a sample onto one of the drum rack slots, the sample gets loaded into a "simpler" instrument, with whatever defaults are defined. There's a setting in simpler, which you can see by double-clicking the drum rack slot to show its device chain, called "Vel" and it can be found in the lower-right corner of the device. This controls how much velocity affects the volume of the sample.

Turn this up.

There's a way to make whatever setting you like be the default for new Simpler instances, but I don't know how to do it. I think jon margulies goes into it at some level though, but I can't remember.

Hope this helps?

By response you mean latency? Check your asio settings in preferences.

Another thing you might want to do is turn off the 'retrigger' parameter in Simpler/Sampler. The little R button next to the pull-down where you choose the number of voices. If this is on snare rolls and the like will sound very unnatural.

Warrior Bob, how's the latency working with you? Can you perform live with your setup? Are you connecting the TD-6 using USB Or MIDI? We've been encountering serious latency issues and haven't figured out how to address them.

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=152096

I'm using a TD-6V to trigger things in Live, and I have experienced no problems with latency personally. I connect via MIDI directly into an M-Audio 1010LT PCI interface.

Ahh. I see.
So triggering a dropped sample is a bit different than triggering a dedicated drum device.
?? I think I'm wrapping my head around it.
I do understand midi quite well, but until now I have always use external sound
modules and groove boxes.

I have a yamaha DTX, and right now I'm looking to expand the number of kits and sounds
I can use in live performances.


I am looking at adding "session drums" and "drum machines" to my
liscense. Is this a good choice for a drummer? sure sounds right.
Are there some instruments in live 8 I could get started with?

Thanks for the input!!
Brian

Hi Brian, if you'd like to try out Drum Machines, it comes as part of the free 30-day trial license of Suite 8. You should also try out some of the drum and percussion sounds that come bundled with Live - check under "Drum Racks" in the browser for some of these sounds.