Ableton Forum

Hey folks, is anyone here using session drums? What's the verdict? Do you like them? Worth the 28gb of space?

I have Suite but I never installed them because it seems like a lot of hard drive real estate. Is there any way to just install some of the kits?

No one has an opinion on session drums?

Meanwhile there are 15 other OT posts on the front page about nothing. Awesome.

I want to know this too. I upgraded to the suite and have the package on the way but I don't have enough disk space to install them without upgrading my laptop hard drive, which I'm considering doing. I would LOVE opinions on session drums and also on whether or not you can partially install them.

Also, I emailed Ableton about the possibility of installing the drums on another drive and they responded saying that "it is possible, but we don't recommend it". What does that mean exactly??

contakt321 wrote:Hey folks, is anyone here using session drums? What's the verdict? Do you like them? Worth the 28gb of space?

I have Suite but I never installed them because it seems like a lot of hard drive real estate. Is there any way to just install some of the kits?

Yes, I like them and think they're worth the space...especially on an external drive.

Yes, I believe you could delete any of the samples you don't like, just like any other sample library. I could be wrong.

Wait, so gaijin1717,

are you saying that you are hosting the session drums on an external drive separate from the drive you are running the Ableton Live application on?

This is what so many were complaining about, that you can't/weren't supposed to do this.

contakt321 wrote:No one has an opinion on session drums?

Meanwhile there are 15 other OT posts on the front page about nothing. Awesome.

Forgive us. I've been a member of this forum for a little while, and while I've done my share of off topic posts I have to say that there definitely are a few people who are really fucking up the forum at the moment. It hasn't always been quite this bad and there are some very knowledgeable people still here.

Unfortunately I have no information to offer about session drums (still using version 5 myself) other than this link of search results:

Click

I also suggest using google site search over the forums built in search function.

Best of luck.

Thanks Smutek. I did try the sites built in search function - it wasnt helpful.

Will be reading through the posts you linked to. Thanks!

Session drums is really good IMO, although I'm not a drummer.

listen to the track at the top of this page - all the drums are session drums on there.

http://www.angstrom.timeshard.com/media.php

db2 wrote:Wait, so gaijin1717,

are you saying that you are hosting the session drums on an external drive separate from the drive you are running the Ableton Live application on?

This is what so many were complaining about, that you can't/weren't supposed to do this.

Yep, that's what I'm saying. You can put your live library on any drive. It doens't have to be the same one that's housing the program itself.

Angstrom: Wow. That track sounds great but not only that, all your songs are great. Nice stuff mate!

I have a second library on an external drive, housing the EIC-instruments. I suppose you can do the same with the session drums.

Don't know why abe's support doesn't recommend this, maybe they think that it is a hassle switching between two libraries.

If it's a hassle for you or not depends mainly on your worflow.... if your external drive is disconnected your sets with session drums will open with missing files, unless you have saved them self contained, etc.

Hey, I have suite and am running my entire library off an external hard drive and am having no trouble. Not particularly happy with session drums. Would have like more midi grooves to come with it. Works well in Live obviously but havent found the sounds that convincing. I am using essential drummer and addictive drummer as a Vst plug in. FInd it is working alot better (albeit cpu hungry).

I don't feel session myself. I find that I much prefer the sound of my own live drums, and I do not have the time or the equipment that these guys have. I suppose that when I have the option of my own equipment it adds a grain of salt to my input, though I relish the sound of ultrabeat in logic, and prefer to work in a digital environment as much as possible (these days my drums are in a desanctified synagogue and they are hard to get to at 3am.)

Eventually I would like to build my own interface. maybe the cycling74/ableton collaboration will make that possible. Drums by nature are so cutomizable and individual-specific. If there was a method to gain the flexability and customization of a max patch with the easability of abletons generally intuitive UI designs and workflow, very good things would happen.

I feel that where session drums falls down is pretty much where LOFA indicated - it's hell to rearrange the larger kits.

I only use the multi-mic kits, and it's bloody awful trying to manage and re-arrange them. Building your own kit and sculpting the sound of the drums involves lots of annoyances. Including:

No sound previews.
drag a 'cymbal' in - surprise - you dragged in 8 cymbals!
ultra-nested drums have abysmal hierarchy navigation and so it is tortuous to adjust a particular voice

The inline mixer is a very small help in some ways and a P.i.t.a. in other ways

The new EIC 2 that comes with the boxed version of Live 7 has "LE" ("lite") versions of all of the instruments, including one of the Session Drums kits.

I basically uninstalled all of the space-hogging old EIC presets I had and put only the LE versions onto my laptop. The full versions of everything are on an external drive. This way, you get to have access to halfway-decent sounding versions of all the instruments for the road when you're doing sketches of songs on your laptop, and then switch to the full versions when you're ready to do the proper recording.

(To do this, just set up two different library locations in the Ableton preferences--and use each as necessary.)

This really is a great feature to have, and the whole "LE" library takes up less space than the full grand piano alone.--nice

For getting up and running quickly with full Live integration, Session Drums is great. As far as the intense customizing that others are talking about here--I haven't gone that deep into this yet, so can't comment. I would think that the ease of use and quality on the front end when arranging make it worth the price--my 2 cents.

best of luck