How to create a Drum kit Selector in Ableton’s Drum Racks
The title of this blog might seem a bit confusing for some of you. Don’t worry, all will soon be explained.
In the past, when I used to make drum beats on a drum machine, it was pretty easy to assign specific sounds to each drum pad, thus quickly building a drumkit that fits my current songwriting mood. These days you have some advantages and disadvantages when it comes to drums when using your computer. On the plus side, it’s pretty easy to make unlimited drum kit presets in Ableton from a nearly unlimited library of samples. On the down side, none of these kits are guaranteed to have the exact sounds you want from the get go. Also, having too many choices can slow you down from what is most important. Making music.
This is where my current solution comes in 🙂
I’ve discovered a clever way to make a single drum rack instrument that is immediately customizable. You simply assign a few simple Macro knobs and you can select the perfect kick, snare, hi hat or pretty much anything else you can think of. This gives you an immediate hands on approach to building your perfect kit on the fly.
Below is a video showing you how it works:
For those of you interested in the drumkit in this video as well as drum racks kits for over 70 Vintage Drum Machines, look no further than my new sample collection. It really has about everything you would need to make any electronic style you want. There is a full Vintage drum machine list at the link below:
Ultimate Drum Machine Sample Collection
Happy Music Making,
Jason
With that said, if you are benefiting from these posts, you will absolutely love my 2 bestselling books:
The Mental Game of Music Production
The Process for Electronic Music Producers
You can also Check out the: Ableton Courses & Instruments
If you are looking for personal guidance with your music production or Ableton, you can set up a free chat with me to go over exactly what your best next steps are to create the best music of your life. If it seems like a good fit, we can move forward from there. https://musicsoftwaretraining.com/private-coaching
Happy music making!
Jason
I love this trick. I have a huge selection of drum samples I got many years ago and have not used much because it was so painful to hunt through them.
Great video!! Now I don’t have to buy a samper to choose the right kick, snare, ect.
The drumracks you created are also great! I use them very often.
I love this idea but i was wondering if there is any way you can make the macro knob turn to each sample. Like in the video you had 19 samples but your knob turned from 0 to 127. Is that possible to map it that way? Thanks -Uncle Mark-
I don’t see a video on this page