Build An Ableton Custom Drum Rack That Chops Drum Breaks For You
Cutting up drum breaks in Ableton Live is a big part of music producer's workflow, but it takes time and often becomes very repetitive.
Not only have we put together a custom drum rack in Ableton that helps automate some of the busy work and make chopping beats feel more fun, we're going to show you how we made it and even go a few steps further.
We're going to walk through the very basics for the beginners, build a beat chopping machine, then embed instances of the autochopper device into a drum rack in Ableton that you can pay and trigger with any MIDI controller.
First, a few definitions for the beginner producers
Advanced people can probably skip ahead.
But, if you're new here's a few terms you should be straight on before you jump in here:
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Drum break - This is a term used interchangeably with drum samples that work as a loop.
You can of course program with MIDI notes or play an original drum part. The term comes from the practice of obtaining samples of drums from a vinyl record. You record isolated drums from the "break" in the song when the other instruments drop out.
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Drum Rack - The drum device with an 8x8 grid you can assign drum samples and instruments(!) to in Ableton Live. You can even nest another drum rack inside a single drum rack in Ableton. (You need to do this to create 'round robin' sample playback which we explain in another article)
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Instrument Racks - These are custom racks usually build from Sampler or Simpler instances, usually meant for playing pitched material.
Why you need all this to be clear
Easy to get confused once we get moving. We will be putting multiple instances of a custom instrument rack inside pads of a drum rack in Ableton.
The Basics of the AUTOCHOPPER Device
AUTOCHOPPER is an effects rack we've put together at Glitch Magic that lets you drag and drop audio in and it will automagically chop it up and apply effects. You can trigger it or let it run on its own, depending on how you set it up and the desired output.
How to use AUTOCHOPPER rack in a drum rack?
We'll get to specifics a little further along in the article.
But the basic idea here is we're going to spread out duplicate instances of an entire auto-chop device across the pads of a drum rack in Ableton. If you've followed our other guides on drum racks and drum programming, this is a twist on some of these techniques.
You will then have a useful tool for mangling the same break in different ways, mashing together different breaks, or mixing them with individual samples like kicks.
How does the AUTOCHOPPER custom rack save time chopping drum breaks?
Instead of having to manually manipulate samples one at a time, you can just run or trigger multiple parallel chains of auto-chop devices with drum rack pads and record the output.
It's more fun and playable than clicking around with the mouse and you can further juice it up but adding different audio effect racks after the chopper. This is the kind of production workflow Ableton Live was designed for.
Where To Download AUTOCHOPPER?
Want to skip ahead to the advanced part of this guide?
Download AUTOCHOPPER from us and skip ahead to the part where we get it setup and programmed on a drum rack pad.
Want to try building the AUTOCHOPPER from scratch?
This has a bunch of steps that may be a little tedious, but it's not too bad for Live users if you're already used to creating drum kits or building synths. Besides, it never hurts to learn how to create your own Ableton devices.
Just be patient and try not to build the drum rack when you're in a rush. If something doesn't work, go back and redo the previous step. It can be a bit tedious to do and it's easy to miss a detail.
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Drag an empty instance of Simpler on to an empty Midi track
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Set Simpler to Slice mode
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Drag a break into the drop zone of the Simpler Plugin.
(If it reverts to the other mode at this step as shown here, just change it back to Slice at this point)
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Change the "Slice By" menu to the Beat option and Set Division to 1/4 (Or try 1/8 later).
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Trim the Start and End markers, then adjust the transient markers to land on the beats.
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Turn Warp on inside Simpler and choose Beats. Set Preserve to 1/4 to start.
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Add an instance of the Random MIDI effect before the Simpler. Set Chance to 100%. Choices should be one less than the number of slices you have. If you have 12 slices, Choices should be 11.
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Add an instance of the Arpeggiator effect before the Random Plugin. Retrigger can be set to Beat or Note. A Rate of 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 can all work depending on the break samples you're using. Gate should be at 100%
How To Setup The AUTOCHOPPER Ableton Rack
You may be good to go at this point or feel comfortable tweaking to get smooth playback.
If you're having trouble with that part watch this video which explains some of the finer points of getting this right.
Make sure you don't skip this step.
If the timing of a single slice is off, it may not sound too bad on it's own, but if you're trying to mash together 4 breaks and the transients are all over the place, the samples are going to be fighting each other and will sound like a jumbled mess.
You'll have to manually fix all that which defeats the purpose of doing all this to give yourself an easy editing experience.
Also, this kind of defeats a lot of the point of using Ableton Live. It's built for fast audio manipulation so you might as well get this part right.
Tips for preparing all the samples and loops you want to use
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If you're using a loop with heavy swing, like a funky hi hat loop, you may need to straighten it out a bit with warp markers first to get it to play well with other loops.
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Straight quantized drums aren't everyone's cup of tea, so if you need to match the swing of a particular drum loop, use the Ableton Groove Pool to extract the swing and apply it to the sounds that need to match. Not a guarantee, but
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Try different slice markers. You can generate them by transient, by beat division, or make them one at a time manually. Usually doing it by quarter note or 1/8th note works, but sometimes generating by hand is the only way to really get it right.
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Match the volume level of samples! As you experiment and swap out other samples in the drum racks, you'll make better choices if you balance the playback level. Samples can sound brighter or darker depending on the level. Our hearing response changes as things get louder or softer.
Get the auto-chop device working on an empty pad of a drum rack in Ableton
At this point you should able to generate lots of auto-chopped drum sounds with only stock plugins all from a single MIDI note!
The cool part is if you do this once with a break like the Amen, you can save the effects rack and use it over and over again whenever you want to chop up that drum break.
Put the Arpeggiator, Random, and Simpler plugins in a Group and hit save on the instrument rack.
We're going to drop audio effects after the auto-chopper later on, but for now we're going to focus on getting it working inside a drum rack.
You can experiment, but we think the most practical setup is to have a drum pad trigger a few chops, then stop when you aren't playing the pad anymore.
To get this to work, drag the entire rack you saved as a group (or browse to the AUTOCHOPPER preset you downloaded from us) and drop it on an available pad in the drum rack pad view.
You will then need to add an instance of the Pitch MIDI effect before the auto-chop group. Set the Pitch effect to -24 steps.
Scale it up with more drum rack chains!
At this point you should have a single drum rack pad autochopping a drum break when you press it.
Pick 3-4 other loops that may work well with the original, or just use the same sample over again and add different effects
You can mix in individual samples too. Filtering some lows out of your breaks and layering an 808 or thick kick drum in on another drum pad usually mixes well.
You may want to try setting up choke groups on certain sounds as well. This depends if you want some of your chopped drum racks to play over each other or not.
Each choke group prevents more than one sound in the group from playing at one time. There's a time and a place for using up to all sixteen choke groups or using none.
Sometimes two full spectrum drum loops on top of each other can sound really cool, but more than that usually results in a pretty jumbled mess and generally requires a choke group to prevent them from stepping on each other, but you want want to send us examples to prove that wrong, please do!
Programming Your New Drum Rack
You now should have a few options for making crazy mashed up beats with this beast of a drum rack.
Don't forget to use the hot swap buttons to swap out samples often or try a slightly different layout of the drum pads. You will get very different sonic results, especially if you have an entire drum rack with different break samples to experiment with.
You can also build in some macro controls to manipulate global effects, add effects into the drum rack's return chains, or experiment with triggering the rack with different MIDI clips and influencing the input signal with MIDI effect racks.
We hope that this article helps you elevate your sound design and production skills in Ableton Live. If you followed along, you not only be able to use the same device over and over again with vastly different results, you should have ideas for other racks of your own design!
