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Subject: How are you doing your drums in Ableton?


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Original Message 1/2                 Date: 23-Sep-05  @  04:05 AM   -   How are you doing your drums in Ableton?

linusstick

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I am on the fence about using Ableton for my productions. I have been using Reason from the start and the sound I can get from it is very good. Only problem is it SOUNDS like Reason. I recently purchased a copy of Ableton and have used it in the following 43 ways. First off this is dance music and second, my forte is drum programming. I can program drums for hours and I am getting discouraged with Ableton-Who has tried these and tell me if my assumptions sound right...

1) First song I did, I just had the Master Out going to Hardware Interface in Reason. Sounded OK, but not much control of individual tracks in Reason (obviously) and only time Ableton was actually used was for pug ins.

2) Then for a while, I went back to old songs I did in Reason and just took cables from mixer and put them directly into hardware interface thus giving each instrument its own track. Sounded better, but lost any send effects from mixer in Reason.

3) After that I started making 4 bar loops of each individual drum in Reason and each scene was labeled 1-8, 9-16, etc and basically to record the track I would just click each scene in succession until the end. Then finally....

4) I decided to just use Reason for drums and have each output from the Redrum going to an individual track in Ableton. That gives alot of flexibility as far as drum control, and I just automate patterns in Reason. My big problem with this is the drums have this hollow and reverby kind of feel. Plus the bass lines using VsTs never come out loud enough to play with the drums. (Guess I took that MClass Suite for granted!)

Long winded question....sorry!

Alan






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Message 2/2                 Date: 23-Sep-05  @  01:37 PM   -   RE: How are you doing your drums in Ableton?

Rags

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ok, I've been into some similar situation so here are my tips:

1. learn to use the key editor (piano roll, whatever) in ableton. Take a good look at the manual, memorise and practice all the key commands (like the ones setting quantize-steps, ctrl-b for switching from edit mode and bact, etc...)

2. i guess its straightforward, but use impulse and simpler. if you use impulse, you can still control each sound from a separate midi-track, and that could come really handy later on when you want to develop your drum tracks further

3. i usually construct my drum tracks on the page with the clips (not arrange). you can make a clip with double-clicking on that excel-table-like thingy (yeah, I know I suck when it comes to the correct live "phraseology") and you can change the length to 1-bar 2-bar, etc. That is good to make some cool interworking patterns, coz once you start a clip, it will loop endlessly, but if their length is different you get nice interactions.

4. ok, the above works for redrum-like drum-machine stuff, but what about sliced loops you might ask. Now, here comes the fun part. You load the loop into an audio track under arrange. You can dissect it by hand, by setting the cursor with the mouse and pressing ctrl-E (if my memory serves me right). So you cut the loop up and then you can drag and drop those pieces into impulse (or simpler)! And from that point you can use impulse just like the famous dr rex.

5. make good use of those clip-envelopes. you can have clip-envelopes for effect parameters as well, so if you stack up an ampsim on an impulse, you can change the ampsim plug's parameters with teh clip envelopes. Get boogex from voxengo, its free and pretty good.

cheers,
Rags



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