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How to Extract a Drum Groove in Ableton

dhogan_98uhi — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 18:32:55 +0000

In Ableton you have the ability to take the groove of any audio or MIDI clip and apply it to the groove of your own clips. This is useful in many situations. If you stumble on an old breakbeat and really like it, you can drop it into the groove pool and extract it.

Here’s the drum groove we’re going to extract. To practice this technique you can get your hands on hundreds of free and premium drum loops at Silicon Beats who have been producing live and electronic drum loops for a long time.

drum loop

Getting started..

Step 1 – Drop your clip into the Groove Pool.

When you drop a clip into the Groove Pool, Ableton will analyze and extract it. You then have all of the normal groove parameters made available to you.

Step 2 – Apply the groove to the desired clip.

Click on the clip you want to apply the groove to. Pull up your Sample editor and choose the appropriate groove from the drop-down menu.

Step 3 – Make some tweaks in the Groove Pool.

You’ll want to make sure, the new groove works well with the clip you applied it to. Loop playback and make some adjustments. Back down on your Timing percentage slightly. Increase your Velocity percentage and introduce a touch of Random into the groove.

drum loop with new groove

Summary

Ableton’s Groove Pool is a very powerful tool. It’s intuitive and flexible. If you want to give your grooves that head-nod factor, then you’ll want to get used to working with it. In event you come across a groove that really catches your attention, drop it into your groove pool, and save the preset so you can access it at a later date.

Ableton Tutorial – How to Route Impulse Pads to Audio Tracks

dhogan_98uhi — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 22:44:10 +0000

In our last discussion we covered the fundamentals of working with Impulse – Ableton’s unique drum sampler. Today we’ll expand upon that and show you how to route the samples within Impulse to multiple tracks.

This is ideal when you have drum samples that need some individual effects processing like Equalization or Compression. Typically, you won’t EQ and Compress your hi-hat groove the same way you would a snare or kick, so it makes sense to split Impulse’s output to several tracks.

Getting started…

Here is the drum loop we’ll be working with:

drum loop as is

It has a kick, snare, and hi-hat in it. The idea is simple, we want each of them to end up recorded onto their own audio track.

Step 1 – Load an Impulse onto a MIDI track and sequence out a drum groove.

Step 2 – Create your audio tracks.

We’ll create 3 audio tracks because our drum sequence has 3 different parts to it (kick, snare, hihat). If we had more sounds than that, like percussion or toms, we would need to create more audio tracks.

We can label these audio tracks as well.

Step 3 – Click on your Impulse track and choose Sends Only from the Audio To drop-down menu. You should notice Impulse has no output now.

Step 4 – Set up your audio tracks to receive input from Impulse.

Select Impulse from the Audio From drop-down menu. Do this for each audio track.

Step 5 - Route your sample outputs to your audio tracks.

Just below the Audio From drop-down menu is another menu that will allow you to zero-in on specific samples within Impulse. It is here that you will assign your specific samples to the desired audio track.

For our kick track we’ll choose our kick sample, for our snare track we’ll choose our snare sample, etc.

Record enable your audio tracks and initiate playback of your session. You should recognize that your sounds are now split up and localized onto their own tracks.

Step 6 – Record your audio.

With all of your audio tracks record enabled, you can record enable your session, trigger playback and Ableton will start recording your drum groove.

Once your drum groove is split up and recorded, you can begin to process your sounds independently of each other.

Summary

Impulse is an intuitive drum machine. If you get accustomed to working with it a lot, you’ll undoubtedly want to route its sample outputs to multiple tracks – just as we have done in this demonstration. Doing so, will give you all of the flexibility you need to create a quality mix.

As always, we hope you found this article helpful and be sure to check back regularly for more great info from Samplepacks.ca!

Ableton Tutorial – Learning Impulse Fundamentals

dhogan_98uhi — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 21:39:18 +0000

Understanding the nuances of Ableton (or any DAW) takes time and effort but is well worth the reward. In today’s article we look at Ableton’s Impulse drum machine and dive into exploring its features.

At its core, Impulse is a drum sampler with sound shaping and modulation capabilities. You can load samples into any of the eight slots and each sample can be time-stretched, saturated, filtered, processed and more.

Impulse is primarily used for housing one-shot drum samples, but it’s worth mentioning that you could drop any sample type (of any sound type) into its slots. A good example would be loops that you wanted to trigger or randomize in a particular manner.

Ableton’s library contains many drum kits for Impulse. We chose to work with the kit ‘Upetty’ from the ‘Electronic’ folder but essentially you can choose any kit or sample source you like.

Let’s take a look its features…

Start, Transposition, and Stretch

Start determines where Impulse begins playing a sample. For example, if you only wanted to catch the tail end of a sample you could adjust your Start time, so it bypasses the desired amount of the samples beginning.

Transposition allows for tuning and pitch-shifting (+/- 48 semitones). This feature is great for quickly tuning your samples so they gel with your mix and also for creating quirky pitch effects.

Stretch controls the length of your sample. Reducing the Stretch will shorten it, whereas lengthening the Stretch will lengthen your samples. Increasing the Stretch by large amounts results in a granular type of effect.

Here’s an audio example of the effect stretching has on this snare:

snare with velocity modulated stretch

Transposition and Stretch can be modulated by note velocity. This is expressed in %, and basically just means that the force at which the sample is triggered will have an impact on modulating these parameters. Random is another way to add some variation.

Take a listen to the effect Random has on modulating the Transposition feature:

hhat with random transpose

Mode refers to the time-stretching algorithm used. Use Mode A for lower sounds like kick drums, whereas Mode B is better for higher sounds like cymbals.

All of these parameters are available for each sample so they can be tailored to your suit your individual needs.

Saturation and Filtering

Saturation allows you to add some Drive and distortion to your samples. This is great for an extra bit of grittiness and crunch.

drum loop with drive applied

The Filter section offers a nice selection of different filter types. It’s ideal for tweaking the sonic characteristics of a sample by removing unwanted frequencies. The Frequency determines the frequency point at which the filter is applied, whereas the Resonance boosts certain frequencies near that point.

The Filtering section can also be modulated by note velocity and Random percentages just like our Stretch and Transposition controls.

Mode determines the Filter type.

The Saturator and Filter are available for each sample.

Volume, Panning, and Decay

As expected, Volume controls the amplitude of each sample. Often times, you’ll need to reduce the volume of a sample if you’ve added a good bit of Saturation and Drive to it. This parameter can also be modulated by note velocity for more dynamics and expression, which has a significant impact on realism in sequenced drums.

Panning allows you to adjust the stereo positioning of your samples. It can also be modulated by note velocity and Random values.

Here’s a drum loop example of the Pan control being modulated by a Random value. It’s applied to the hi-hat.

drum loop with random pan applied to hhat

The Decay envelope has two different modes: Trigger Mode reacts so that the Decay ensues upon triggering the sample; Gate Mode makes the Decay wait until the sample note is released before kicking in. Use Gate mode when you need to vary your Decay lengths, as with hi-hat sounds.

Global Controls

Global Controls affect all of the samples within Impulse. Based on the information we’ve already covered you should understand what Volume and Transposition functions do. Time is basically the Stretch feature we have also discussed previously – except it applies to all samples within Impulse’s domain. Increase the Time for global, granular stretching effects.

Take a listen to our example with the Time maxed out.

drum loop with global time stretching

Wrap Up…

Impulse is a drum sampler with flexible controls for manipulating sounds (individually and globally). It can’t hold as many samples as the Drum Rack, but it has some manipulative features the Drum Rack does not. Its biggest strengths are ease of use and flexible sound shaping parameters.

Get used to learning the components in Ableton – often times they are more powerful than you initially think they are. As always, we hope you found this tutorial helpful and be sure to check back regularly for more great info from Samplepacks.ca!

How to use the Choke feature in Ableton’s Drum Rack

dhogan_98uhi — Mon, 04 Jun 2012 00:36:54 +0000

There are many things you can do to give a sequenced drum groove more of a realistic feel. Among them, is the ability to ‘choke’ your hi-hat samples so they emulate how a real drummer switches between an open hat and a closed hat.

Choking is the use of triggering one sample to cutoff another and/or vice versa. In the example of our hi-hat samples, we particularly want our closed hi-hat to choke our open hi-hat.

Here’s what that sounds like:

hihat_choke_example

Without choke group active:

hihat_no_choke_example_2

If you’re the type that likes to create your own drum kits from one-shot samples, then you’ll probably want to choke your open hi-hat hits.

Getting Started…

Pull up the drum rack of your choice or create a new one and drop in your hi-hat samples. To access the choke feature in Ableton you’ll need to expand your Chain List and Mixer (within your drum rack).

You can expand your Chain List by clicking on the circle icon with 3 bars running through it.

Now, scroll down and click on the I-O icon so you can access your Mixer.

In your Mixer you will find the Choke feature with a drop-down menu for each sample.

Set all of your hi-hat samples to the same Choke group. In our case, we set them all to group 1.

Once they’re all grouped, you’re good to go!

Wrap Up…

You can use this feature for more than just hi-hats. It’s particularly useful when you have a set of audio samples that you want to trigger in a quick percussive manner. Sometimes a sample’s length is longer than the interval at which you’re triggering it. This can cause bleeding, overlapping, etc..

How do you prevent bleeding? By choking!

We hope you found this tutorial helpful. If you’re in need of some hot loops and samples then stop by PlatinumLoops – they’ve got you covered!

As always, be sure to check back regularly for more great articles from Samplepacks.ca!