Ableton Forum

Hey, I'm gonna be recording some live drums into ableton, just curious if anyone has any set up tips or advice. I've never done it before so it should be interesting.

B

make sure sources are clean then just arm tracks and record.

Don't use a click track. Steady bpm is boring!

I'm not a 'proper' recording engineer, I've just sat back and watch it happen before.
I'm sure we have actual drummers here who can comment better, but hell, I'm made out of solid opinions so here goes.

watch out for transient peaks, better to record in a nice high bit-depth and see a -12db peak than try to hit -3db and discover later that there were tons of clipped transients on your input device. That's a horrible feeling. They can happen really easily too on the A-to-D.

Recorded drums might sound a lot "quieter" than you expect especially if they are just being tracked straight without using any personality-laden preamps and fancy mics. Don't worry about it. Aim for a low noise floor and as long as you have the bit depth to compress and tinker later it's all good. beware a temptation to put hardware noise-gates on the mics. When you compress in production you'll hear those bastards killing your cymbal & tom tails.


Some people will mildly compress their mics on the way in, on a very very mild slope with very subtle timings just to get it all in a nice dynamic range. I confess I would also do this. Mind you I'd probably drive the mic preamps like a bastard too. I am a heathen.

Ableton specific tips: you can select all the different clips (from different mics) and then warp them all together.

You can also make one of them the "master" and the whole tempo of Live will follow it - that way you can add triggered MIDI drums to it as well.

ummm.. what else..... you can extract groove from a section of it as well and either apply that groove to MIDI clips, or you can use the groove file itself as a MIDI clip and just change the notes...