Ableton Forum

Hey guys/gals I've been running Ableton 8 for some time now and everything works great so far except one thing....

I have an Alesis Controlpad midi controller with the usual 8 pads, midi in/out, usb a couple extra trigger inputs and a power-in. yet no matter how much time I mess with this thing, i can't seem to map any samples directly to a pad. It seems like the pads don't trigger specific CC notes. I know this is sort of a light-duty piece of equipment but I'd love to get some use out of it instead of selling it.

There are a few ways to assign samples to the pads.

1. Use it as a midi instrument. You create a midi channel, drop an instrument into that channel, turn on the 'monitor' button. The tricky part now is to make sure that your pads are hitting the notes that will trigger the samples on your instrument. If I can't figure out what note a pad is triggering, I'll load up a 'note length' into that MIDI channel. That makes the duration of the notes longer (with the controlpad they are super short and hard to spot). Next I'll add a MIDI rack, and expand it so that I can see the piano keys. Now when you hit notes on the Alesis, they should show up on those keys. Lastly, via your controller, you can edit what note your pads are triggering

2. Use it to trigger Ableton audio clips. Make sure that in your MIDI Preferences, your controlpad is turned On for both Track and Remote. Then when you turn on Ableton's MIDI Map mode, you can assign your pads to either individual clips, Or, on each channel, there is a new 'play button' that pops up just above the Sends. This triggers any clip that is on the row of the Scene which is highlighted. To take even further advantage of that, you can use the Scene up and down buttons to change drum layouts.

When triggering audio clips, make SURE that your audio clips launch modes are set to None. Otherwise, your clips will always wait the duration of whatever your global quantization is before they launch.

I hope this covered everything

awesome, thank you for the input. By chance, could you help me with another strange thing I ran into?

I was trying to make my own "synth" by recording two octaves of guitar notes, one at a time. I did the two octaves, got tired and saved. When I came back to the project, instead of just having the two octaves of notes in the little slots for samples, I had the entire 88 notes, as if Ableton figured out what I was trying to do and did the rest for me. Does this sound like anything you've heard of?

tfrost1988 wrote:awesome, thank you for the input. By chance, could you help me with another strange thing I ran into?

I was trying to make my own "synth" by recording two octaves of guitar notes, one at a time. I did the two octaves, got tired and saved. When I came back to the project, instead of just having the two octaves of notes in the little slots for samples, I had the entire 88 notes, as if Ableton figured out what I was trying to do and did the rest for me. Does this sound like anything you've heard of?

cancel that, i just figured it out!