Infinite Beats
Apr 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Asher Fulero
EXPLORE THE ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES OF ABLETON LIVE 7'S DRUM RACKS
Large, complicated Drum Racks can be expanded horizontally, showing you a separate track for each chain.
Admittedly, I'm an absolute geek for Ableton Live. Ever since version 3, I eagerly await each new release with an excitement that verges on obsession. Fortunately, because Ableton Live is also extraordinarily popular with Remix readers, I'll consider you all as my support group. While the latest upgrade to Live 7 rocks a ton of upgraded elements, the one I inevitably end up talking about with people is the impressive new Drum Rack instrument. Included with all the various incarnations of Live 7 ($499 download/$599 boxed, including the Essential Instrument Collection 2, or $799 download/$999 boxed for the Ableton Suite; www.ableton.com), this Ableton-only device has an innately flexible design, making it adaptable for uses way beyond just drum sounds. In my Remix review of Ableton Live 7 and Ableton Suite (February 2008 issue), there wasn't enough space to really delve into what the Drum Rack can do, so now we'll explore some of the intended (and unintended) uses of the Drum Rack.
THE BLUEPRINT
To begin, let's get familiar with the Drum Rack's available facilities and basic layout. The device appears in Live's left-hand Browser under Instruments, and if you have the sold separately Session Drums or Drum Machines collections installed, they will also appear there inside a folder titled Kits (individual drums are available as patches there as well). Drag-and-drop either a preset or an empty Rack onto a MIDI track to create an instance; or you can double-click on a preset or an empty Rack inside the Browser to automatically create a new MIDI track holding your selection.
The Rack itself contains four main sections that can each be viewed or hidden via small buttons on the left-hand side of the Rack. First (from left to right) are the Macro controls: eight assignable knobs that can control any number of destinations anywhere inside the Drum Rack. Just like on Ableton's Instrument and Effect Racks, they are great for simply pulling together your most used parameters or for creating vast changes with a single knob turn. Creative use of the Macros can turn a ho-hum patch into an indispensable tool.
Second is the Pad View, a futuristic mutant-MPC-like interface with 16 Pads, each sporting Mute, Solo and Trigger buttons, as well as a customizable Title Strip. Although you can see only 16 Pads at a time, there are actually a whopping 128 available Pads (one for each MIDI note), each of which each can represent a any number of Chains. As in Live's other Racks, a Chain can carry any number of Ableton devices, VST or Audio Units instruments/effects or routings to/from external sources (thanks to Live 7's new External Instrument/Effect devices). So you can consider each Pad to represent a single MIDI note, yet each of those MIDI notes can in effect be playing any combination of objects from Live's browser — samples, effects, instruments and preset — organized into a Chain or Chains. As you drag such objects onto a Pad, Ableton automatically maps them to the Pad's note and reconfigures the Chain.
The uniquely effective Pad Overview graphic along the right-hand side shows all 128 Chains with a movable square that allows you to quickly shift your view to any 16 of them. In fact, if you're using one of Ableton's supported control surfaces with pads (such as the M-Audio Trigger Finger) and you click on the Drum Rack to select it, Live will automatically reassign your incoming signals to the currently visible Pads as you gleefully surf around the Pad Overview graphic. Empty Pads are gray, and those in use are white, making them easily distinguishable from each other.
Next in line is the Chain List, where you can create, edit, move, swap and extract Chains and the devices they hold. Just about anything goes as far as rearrangement inside the Rack itself. The Chain List is the branching-off point for parallel flows of devices, making it easy to organize groups of similar elements into “mix groups,” and it offers its own internal effects sends and returns. The complete mix system provides optional views in the Chain List for I/O, sends and returns, with each Chain operating like a channel strip on a mixing console. In fact, in Live's Session view, a vertical track carrying a Drum Rack can be expanded horizontally to reveal separate tracks for each Chain; some of the Session Drums patches are impressively huge when expanded to full view, and for some, that can be the faster way to work with complex Drum Racks. A Chain's audio output is routed to the main Rack Output by default, but each has a chooser that can route it to the main output of the Rack or any of the return tracks in the Live Set. Also inside the Chain List are 16 assignable Choke Groups, great for hi-hat samples but also incredibly useful in a number of other scenarios.
The last of the four main sections is the Chain View, which will reveal a Chain's contents for adjustment or assignment. When enabled, the Auto Select button at the Rack's far left will automatically display the contents of the currently selected Chain as you work. Otherwise, simply double click on a Pad to reveal its Chain or Chains (and again to hide it). A quick way to surf a Drum Rack's contents is to double click on the top entry in the Chain List to reveal its contents and then use your arrow keys to quickly scroll down the list.
AUTO BEATS, ROLL OUT
If you have the Session Drums and Drum Machines collections installed, there are a whole host of great preset kits waiting to be dropped into your session, as well as Chains for each individual drum (with great preset Macros) that can be dropped into any Pad for quick mixing and matching of kit elements. But if you have only the basic Live 7 package, you'll definitely need to create some patches of your own. Fortunately, there are several ways to speed up that process and get you playing the Drum Rack quickly.
The first is Live 7's new Slicing feature, something I always loved about Propellerhead Reason but never appeared in Live until now. Slicing automates the division of samples into smaller chunks. Live makes the process very easy and quick: First select any audio clip from your session or the Live Browser and choose the Slice To New MIDI Track option from the contextual menu (right click). Choose a beat division for slicing and hit Go; Live will auto-create a MIDI track carrying a Drum Rack with a Chain for each slice as well as a single MIDI Clip at the top of the track that contains one note for each slice, arranged in chromatic order. When triggered, the MIDI Clip will make the original sample sound unchanged; however, you can now re-sequence the MIDI notes to manipulate the chunks any way you see fit. Or better yet, abandon the Clip and create your own pattern using the same sounds by simply playing the Pads and recording a pass. That has always been an essential beat-remixing approach, and it's great to see Live embracing it and even improving on the concept; for easy slicing of a vocal take, create warp markers just before each word and then use them as your beat division for slicing. It works just as well on a horn performance, dividing samples into individual notes for quick sampler-style use with virtually no setup.
Another time-saving feature is the ability to drag-and-drop multiple samples directly into the device; Live will happily auto-assign them to a group of Pads in a row, each inside an instance of Live's Simpler instrument on its own Chain. To make things faster all around, in the Pad View, you can simply drag-and-drop one Pad onto another to swap Chains, making rearrangement of samples incredibly easy. Without missing a beat, you can select a batch of samples in the browser, drag them onto the Drum Rack and be triggering them from your controller; that is a much more rewarding way of surfing through new sample banks than auditioning them one by one. Alternatively, if you have samples grouped into kits already (from old samplers, perhaps), you can import, place, assign and play them faster than ever before. While I may still choose Live's dedicated multisampling instrument Sampler for more complicated single-instrument mappings, any producer used to working with an MPC or stand-alone sampler will appreciate the Drum Rack's flexible and powerful workflow.
EFFECT SCHEMES
A great way to enhance your custom patch is to combine it with Live's MIDI Effects. Adding the Pitch effect before your Drum Rack lets you easily point your incoming MIDI to anywhere across the 128 Pads without reassigning anything — great for devices without support for Ableton's Surface Mapping. The Velocity device acts like an audio compressor/expander on the incoming MIDI velocity data and can be essential for dialing in just the right global dynamic response for your patch, especially in cases with a high number of samples, where it would take forever to adjust each Simpler instance manually. The Arpeggiator device can be useful as well; set it to eighth notes and a single octave, and you can get a quick and easy kick-and-snare house beat just by holding down two notes. On the extreme end, I imagine a Drum Rack that contains 128 Chains, each with a Sampler device loaded with 128 short samples and instances of the Random device at the top of each Chain. With an Arpeggiator device and another Random device just before the Rack itself, I could play a random-yet-rhythmic pattern drawn from 16,384 samples by pressing only a single note!
In using the Drum Rack, I wondered whether it would be feasible to create an entire song from within a single instance — the advantages being the ability to surf through songs like presets and not having to switch sessions to change songs. However, it doesn't really work because without a “latch” feature on the Simpler, the sample can be set to loop, but only with a release set in seconds; there's no way to make a sample go forever without holding down the note/pad and no way to quantize its trigger as with a regular Live Clip Slot. One killer feature for future versions would be a Pad Quantize setting for aligning each Pad's hit to a custom time value, making it easier to sync clips with the same bpm inside a Drum Rack.
DRUMMER'S PARADISE
To truly get an idea of the capacity of the Drum Rack, I suggest checking out the Session Drums and Drum Machines collections that are included as part of the Live 7 Suite or sold separately for basic versions. While they eat a whopping 28 GB of hard-drive space, they offer some of the most hyper-detailed Rack layouts you can imagine. Taking a bit of time to surf through the patches and understand how they're laid out can be a great learning experience. They use a bunch of excellent techniques, such as putting the Random and Velocity MIDI devices together to automate alternating between multisamples. The Session Drums presets can help give you a quick lesson in the breadth of the Drum Rack's power, including tons of great ideas for how to use the Macro knobs and novel uses of the effects devices on internal Rack sends/returns. On top of that, the Session Drums and Drum Machines kits contain some of the cleanest and biggest sounding individual drum samples I've heard and are a dream to blend into a mix, requiring much less processing than other drum sample banks I've tried.
If you've upgraded to Live 7 but haven't taken the time to really check out the power of the new Drum Rack, do yourself a favor and spend some time messing around on it. With a little creativity, you'll never want to go back to your old drum sampler.
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