Open Kontakt Kits in Drum Racks

[selthym]

Timur, you have almost convinced me... BUT...

When I change drum Kits in Battery the routings for each cell change back to Master. Am I doing something wrong or do I need to save all the default kits with new routings?

If so, If you have already done this, care to share?

[e-theory]

Thanks alot E-Theory. I asked Ableton more than once about the this restriction and did not get any answer. Finally some definitive answer wether Live, Battery or VST is to be blamed

No worries! Always glad to be of help. I like to dabble with coding too and have made a couple of interesting VST effects experiments. I would love to try and manipulate this MIDI standard and see if specifying a number bigger than 16 would be recognized by the major hosts. My bet is the only company not following the spec would be Steinberg, and that Cubase probably would probably accept an unlimited number of MIDI channels. One day I will test that....

So the best solution seems to be the one that was demonstrated by user Penningt in the other thread: Combine your Battery cells into logical groups (like: toms, overheads, percussions etc.), output those groups to single stereo channels (like all toms on channel 5) and you should come quite a long way with a single instance of Battery.

Actually before even reading through the posts you sent me this is the original way that I wanted to use Battery with the Drum Racks/multi-output routing.

The way I have my template setup now sets all the Recv./Play notes to C-2 ( so they are effectively ignored as I don't care about them or the little play triangle ), and all of the External Instruments are set to send to Battery MIDI channel 2, but the overall rack is set to only accept MIDI from channel 1. So the drum cells do nothing bit route my audio, instead of generating their own midi data.

So basically I am not using the Drum Rack as a drum rack at all, but a nice, foldable and re-routable VST Instrument polyphonic mixer, with the ability to use send/return functionality to the rest of Live ( this ability alone is completely phenomenal - who gives a crap about Battery reverb when I can run everything to any other VST/Live processors in any configuration I can imagine.... The only thing is that the Piano roll doesn't write the correct names next to the notes when you treat the audio as groupings instead of literal relations to MIDI notes, as you have mentioned before - but from my point of view that is the absolute least of my worries. Ableton should have made every note user editable on the piano roll anyway.

The most creative and useful thing from such a setup is working like so ( an extension to Penningt's suggestion ):

I have a chain for kick, snare, fills, rides, break1, break2, etc. so I am grouping the channels by purpose, not note. That way I can add effects processing to each and every set of grouped hits in very clever ways. For instance, using the Drum Rack automatic Grouping I can create another Drum Rack with separate chains to process the Kick and Snare separately, all still within the nice folding mixer interface, then mix them and process the kick+snare mix with another set of processors, then sidechain the rest of the mix with the kick and a little bit of the snare with the Live compressor side-chained to the individual kick and snare channel, then on a totally separate VST elsewhere within the set running my bassline, access the individual kick channel from the Drum rack to sidechain it by. Man, the possibilities are endless, and far more interesting than the concept that the drum racks were made for in the first place.

This is quite simply exactly how I have always wanted to work within live, and I am kicking myself I hadn't tried all this before. It is just so damn cool. You can even successfully freeze the whole thing - which was impossible for me previously using the inputs to audio channels for the drum routings before....

I am going to find it hard to go to sleep now dammit....

When I change drum Kits in Battery the routings for each cell change back to Master. Am I doing something wrong or do I need to save all the default kits with new routings?

I think the main reason to use all of these techniques is for creating your own kits for experimentation and fine grained custom drum processing etc. You are not doing anything wrong, and you will have to save all the default kits out with your new routings. The point is though, your idea of a good set of routings may be very very different from someone else's, so I think you should do the boring manual labor of actually assigning the outputs yourself, as you will learn a lot about how you like to work as well, as over time you will change the routings to suit what works best for you. Give it a go and see how it goes - it's time consuming but a good exercise to do.

[Timur]

Timur, you have almost convinced me... BUT...

When I change drum Kits in Battery the routings for each cell change back to Master. Am I doing something wrong or do I need to save all the default kits with new routings?

If so, If you have already done this, care to share?

You either need to save the new routings as new Battery kits or as a Live set (all VST settings will be saved with the set) so that later you can use one of these as a template for your work.

Be aware that Battery "Master Effects" are only available on Channel 1/2 (Master channel).

[Timur]

The only thing is that the Piano roll doesn't write the correct names next to the notes when you treat the audio as groupings instead of literal relations to MIDI notes, as you have mentioned before - but from my point of view that is the absolute least of my worries. Ableton should have made every note user editable on the piano roll anyway.

You can easily do that by putting a "Midi Effect Rack" on your Midi drum track. Create one chain per Battery drum cell and change its key to the corresponding Midi note of the Battery cell. Now you can manually rename it and that will nicely show up on the Piano Roll once you enable "Fold". The Midi Effect Rack serves no other purpose than providing name holders but no one keeps you from putting some Midi effects into it as well.

Like I said: Best of both worlds if you are a bit creative!

[e-theory]

Wow, can't wait to try that out!

In the meantime I wanted to show you what last nights excitement and lack of sleep produced - a track inspired by Battery working with Live like I have always wanted it to - very early days so please no comments about how shite the mixdown is, I know :

artist - evolutionary theory : title - Wonderous
copyright 2008 - Luke Emrose

http://evolutionary-theory.com/temp/e-t ... %200.2.mp3

[Timur]

For small to medium Drum Racks with upto 32 cells you better use my original concept though. Because then there is no need to group channels in Battery and you can better control each single sound from within Live (like volume, pan and even form groups).

For those who didn't get the "panning" idea. You pan a mono cell/sample hard left/right within Battery and pan another mono cell hard to the other side on the same stereo channel. Then in Live you use the "Mono" Utility to transform the panned stereo channel into 2 mono channels (1 stereo channel = 2 mono channels = upto 32 channels per instance of Battery). Don't do that with stereo cells/samples though, because panning those to one side results in a different sounding cell.

[selthym]

artist - evolutionary theory : title - Wonderous
copyright 2008 - Luke Emrose

http://evolutionary-theory.com/temp/e-t ... %200.2.mp3

Nice Track. Love the drums.

A really basic drum question below?
Does your Kick hit on the 1 & 11, snare 5 & 13 with a hat that hits on the 9 amongst others? I like the groove of it.

[e-theory]

Cheers! Glad to hear you dig it. It is only a couple of hours of mucking around, so there is a lot that I will need to do to it.

Funny you should say you like the drums, they are the first thing that I want to change! They were just a template kit I made up a while ago to put in tracks that I am starting - I'll change them for something a bit more "played live" sounding I think.

As for the pattern, here it is:
C-1 = Kick
C#1 = Snare
E-2 = Ride1
F-2 - Ride2


So nothing fancy - but yes, it is Kick 1, 11, Snare 5, 13. If you are unfamiliar with this pattern then I think you should type the name "Drum and Bass" into a browser and see what you have been missing out on in music's most recent and happening genre all these years. Check out artists like "Pendulum", "Calyx", "Noisia", "High Contrast" and "Break and Silent Witness" for an endless variation of versions of that pattern - you'll never go back to another form of music again!

Here is another track I started last night, again rough as guts with a lot of placeholder things I will change, but it was a brain dump for an idea I had on the train on the way home. Any comments on the idea welcome, again the production is at a very early stage.

e-theory - "It's Not Yet Tomorrow" - copyright 2008 Luke Emrose

http://evolutionary-theory.com/temp/e-t ... %200.3.mp3

I think I will migrate over to the post your own track section next time - I am getting off topic....

[Timur]

Funny you should say you like the drums, they are the first thing that I want to change! They were just a template kit I made up a while ago to put in tracks that I am starting - I'll change them for something a bit more "played live" sounding I think.

Easy trick with good impact: change the velocities of the hihat notes, that already brings lot of life to them.

[e-theory]

Definitely, along with slight modulation of pitch, timing ( sliding in non-grid mode a little forwards or backwards to add some more groove ), filtering ( LPF more for quieter hits etc. ), layering, reverb etc. etc. It's generally good to do all of these things at a later stage of production - else it takes away from the main aim of song writing - writing the song - it's good to get down the song into live even as sine wave beeps playing the correct notes if need be and flesh out the basics, then the progression of everything - patch programming later on - etc. etc. - all of the fancy drum work comes later, Otherwise you get bugged down in detail unnecessarily early.

But yes, definitely, it is a very good tip to ensure things sound very nice and loose and "played" sounding for sure.

[selthym]

So nothing fancy - but yes, it is Kick 1, 11, Snare 5, 13. If you are unfamiliar with this pattern then I think you should type the name "Drum and Bass" into a browser and see what you have been missing out on in music's most recent and happening genre all these years. Check out artists like "Pendulum", "Calyx", "Noisia", "High Contrast" and "Break and Silent Witness" for an endless variation of versions of that pattern - you'll never go back to another form of music again!

Thanks mate... I am into breaks and D&B so quite used to these and many other broken patterns. For some reason my patterns always sound a little flat & programmed, hence the reason I asked the question, wanted to know if I was something very basic. I'm realising the main groove has less to do with the kick & snare, but more to do with the hats, shakers, rimshots, and bass.

[e-theory]

Oooops, sorry for the misinterpretation . I totally understand though - making dance music it is difficult to move away from the way quantized music reduces grooviness - I've sent you a PM with a rather detailed tips about getting your MIDI groove on - hope they are useful!

[onebluesphere]

This question has way more sense now that we have PUSH

[selthym]

5 years on and I did a google search to see if you can convert sampler to drum racks in Live 9... Discovered I started the topic 5 years ago.

I have heaps of drum kits in .kit or .nki format I wish I could use in drum racks.