Learning Ableton: Drum Kit (Week 1)

Learning Ableton

My knowledge of Ableton is spotty, but this laptop application is now in my essential toolkit for my ongoing Sensors and Soundscapes artwork.

During my winter session at Mars College, I’m setting up a structure for learning, which is that every week, I will tackle a new core feature of Ableton and try to learn what I can in several multi-hour study sessions.

I’ll develop some Live Sets to explore these features some notes on what I discovered and what I got stuck on. These get pushed to a Git repo, which could be useful, I guess, but probably more for my own notes.

 

Week 1: Drum Kit

I learned quite a bit ab out Drum Kits this week. The history of the drum kit, goes back to the 19th century with the slow evolution of the single player drum set, that we are now familiar with in all sorts of music.

Most people usually use just 16 pads (though technically they can have up to 128) — or samples that don’t have pitch associated with them. A lot of the controllers support just 16 switches.

Often, they are one-shot samples, emulating a drum set, or a variation on them They can be repurposed to be any sample, and you can chain kits together, apply instrument racks, MIDI effects to specific pads, or to an entire set.

Probably the coolest, though maybe not most useful feature is the ability to create your own drum kit using AI. The steps are in the repo, and it feels kind of clunky, but what you can go is gets say a 5-second clip of a drum track you like, and then slice them to MIDI tracks, where each sample becomes its own pad. You can then do a Swap Similar, to alter the pads to samples in your own library. You can even use the beat patterns that are in that sample and play with them.

Sort of stealing, or borrowing, but the music industry is filled with this ethos of sampling, remixing and maneuvering. I don’t see a problem with it.

Here is the GitHub Repo is link to my weekly explorations