Ableton Forum

Hi folks,

When one loads up a drum rack, it normally only consists of sounds on C1 to D#2 (i know some can be more, but let's leave that aside for now)

Directly to the left of the virtual drum pads you have that vertical slider that will give you access to higher and lower (so far unpopulated) 4 x 4 matrices.

Now, my naïve and eternally optimistic self would hope that if one drag / dropped another drum rack into one of these unused matrices, it would fill that rack, while still keeping the already loaded sounds on C1 to D#2.

But it is not to be, that above described action will simply replace the initial rack.

Sooooooo, does anyone have any hacks / workarounds that will let one do something like i describe?

I'm guessing not as assigned macros will clash. But not if each 4x4 matrices had it's own set of macros.

My motivation is to be able to have one drum rack loaded up with a huge amount of sounds in order to quickly and somewhat randomly find interesting sounds.

I have M4L if that helps

Thanks!

No quick and dirty way, you can do it with a bit of footwork.

Madeleine Bloom's suggestion: Ableton Live Insider Tips: The Fastest Way to Combine Drum Racks | Sonic Bloom

Thanks, that works but is quite a lot of hassle for quick searching of samples!

Another way to do it is use a dummy master drum rack that feeds it's midi to other midi tracks with their own drum racks.

So on the 4 receive drum racks tracks, put these pitch midi plugins (for populating all 64 pads on Push 2):

top left: -16 semitones
top right: -48
bottom left: 0 (so, no pitch plugin)
botton right: -32

That gives you 4 drum racks on your 64 pads on either Push or Launchpad. But of course you could fill out all your matrices in your dummy master rack if you wanted, just add more drum rack tracks and adjust the pitch plugin accordingly.

Once you find a sample you like, you can bring it over to a new drum rack track.

I think that method is much quicker then how she's doing it!

Another problem with her method is it throws away the drum rack master FX, which often radically alters the drum sounds. So the sounds she's dragging in often won't even sound like how they're supposed to!

I agree. I just tried this and it's exactly what happened - all the imported sounds were suddenly routed through the original drum rack's reverb, making them sound completely washed out. You can change the output to rack output, but this basically means that only the original rack will sound like it's supposed to - all the other imported ones will lack any effects their rack had. You could I suppose add all the racks' individual effects in, but that would take ages.

Your method sounds much better. Presumably you'd have to switch tracks to operate the individual rack's macros though?

Another option is with chains - the process is essentially the same as the dummy track method but self contained, you just place a pitch device in each chain as required. It's easy to add post effects to all chains via this method.

Edit: if you define key zones for the chains in the Key Zone Editor and activate Auto Select, you can reveal the Macros in Push when you play each instance.