Ableton Forum

Hi pals.

After spending a while processing a kick drum sound that I wanted, I opened up a drum rack, and dropped this bass kick sound into it. However, when I play my kick sound through the drum rack it doesn't sound as good.


My plan was to shape a few drum sounds individually and drop them all into drum rack. I don't understand the drop in quality,its quite frustrating! Anyone know what's going on here/ what I can do?

Can you define "loss of sound quality"? The default Simpler preset for Drum Racks is a bit illogical--the release time is quite short, the Volume is -12db, and the "Vel" (Velocity sensitivity) is set to 0%.

In other words, your sample is likely playing at a much lower level than you'd like, and potentially getting cut off early as a result of the short release time. Play with these 3 values until you find something that works for you, and then save them your settings as the default Simpler preset: https://www.ableton.com/answers/drum-racks-presets

Did you resample the Kick passing through FXs before dropping it into a drum rack ?

louder is perceived as sounding better, especially with kicks.

...

Right I see! I'll go and mess with the settings in the drum rack, try and get it sorted that way! I'll let you know if it works!

Thanks for the help!

Don't forget, in Live 9 you can save default settings for all devices. So once you've found a decent starting point for Simpler, simply right click the device title bar and "Save as default preset".

Toodles.

These odd default settings of simpler and sampler have been causing confusion and a lot of bollocks about inferior sound quality among noobs for a decade now. I don't understand why Ableton won't change the default settings.

They have in Live 9. Well, to be fair, they've made them even worse—Simpler now has the filter turned on by default. But like I said, you can change it.