This is the second lesson in our multi-part course series, How to Make Your First Beat in Ableton Live. To follow along from the beginning, click here, or check out our Mainstage course, Beat Making in Ableton Live, for a more in-depth mentor-assisted experience!
Apr 16, 2015 Posted on Apr 16, 2015. AfroDJMac is an Ableton Live Certified Trainer and an all around good cat! If you have somehow missed his blog, not to sure how that could happen, he has constructed, gathered, manipulated, tweaked, sampled and done other marvelous things for you and your music. Basically what I would like would be to take an empty drum rack in Ableton, open Battery as vst plugin, load a battery kit, and then simply drag and drop within the empty drum rack the sounds from that kit I want to use. Then I can save my ableton drum rack kit made of indivudual battery sample. Hope that makes sense?? Wicked Kits includes 5 free Ableton Live Drum Kits optimized for Ableton Live and programmed for real-time performance. It is packed with a number samples from classic drum machines, synths and vinyl. 4: Trigger the sounds in the Drum Rack in several ways. Use Live’s virtual MIDI keyboard – aka computer keyboard – or any MIDI keyboard or a pad-device like Novation’s Launchpad or Ableton’s Push. 5: Drum Racks usually default to note C1 triggering the bottom left pad, which is typically a kick drum. Nov 27, 2018 Introducing Drum Racks. Ableton Live comes equipped with two different drum instruments: Impulse and Drum Rack. I admire Impulse for its ease of use and flexibility. However, its bigger sibling Drum Rack is the one I find myself reaching for most often. Drum Rack offers a powerful solution to drum programming and MIDI sequencing.
Let’s start by familiarizing ourselves with the beat-making tools in Ableton. First, I’d like to point out that Ableton Live actually has two instruments designed for beat building.
Impulse, released back in 2004 with Ableton 4, was Ableton’s original drum machine and still remains in the program. It’s still used by producers who appreciate its simplicity and elegance.
The instrument this course will focus on is Ableton’s Drum Rack. Drum Rack is available in each of the three versions of Ableton Live: Intro, Standard, and Suite. To really get the most out of this course, however, you should at least have Standard and consider investing in Suite to take full advantage of Ableton’s amazing beat-making possibilities.
Locating the Instrument
Free Ableton Drum Kits
Step one: Find the Drum Rack. To start, mouse over to the arrow on the upper left-hand side that allows us to open Ableton’s browser window. When you open the browser, there will be two ways to access the Drum Rack. The first is in the “Drums” tab. You’ll find it sitting directly beneath the “Drum Hits” folder.
You can also find the Drum Rack in the “Instruments” tab in the browser.
Let’s click back to the Drums tab again. If you press the arrow to the left of the “Drum Hits” tab, it will open to reveal a series of various types of drum hits. Let me explain what these are. If the file has .aif or .wav after it, it can be loaded directly into a cell in the Drum Rack.
Ableton Drum Rack Download
We’ll be doing a lot of this in a bit. If the file has .adg after it, this stands for “Ableton Device Group.” In the Drums tab, these primarily contain Drum Racks that already have samples loaded into them.
Empty Drum Rack Download Ableton Free
One nice feature about Ableton’s browser is that you can preview sounds quite easily. Make sure the blue headphones icon is turned on. Then click on a .aif, .wav, or .adg file once, and you’ll be able to hear what it sounds like. You can adjust the preview volume level by moving the blue knob in the master channel.
Loading an 808 Kit
Follow along with the video below to load Ableton’s Kit-Core 808.adg into a session of your own.