How To Make An Ableton Drum Rack That Doesn't Suck

So let's dive in! Here are some of our favorite ways to make cool drum racks you'll actually want to use and share with friends.

Layer Drum Samples That Compliment Each Other

Rather than going on some mystical vision quest in search of the perfect kick sample (or whatever it is you need) find 2-3 sounds that almost work and see if you can layer them together.

Another approach you can use here is to break the sound you need into components. An interesting and functional kick can usually be made by layering an 808-like synthesized kick drum with a more colorful, vinyl sampled kick drum in another chain on the same drum rack pad.

For a snare, try layering 1-2 more typical snares then a clap sound or foley effect to give it extra smack and crunch.

In Ableton, the way to accomplish this is you drag a Simpler instance onto a drum rack pad. Then, click on the Simpler instance you just made and put it into a group. You can now make multiple chains in that group where more instances of Simpler live and all the samples will play back together when you trigger that pad. 

It's always nice to find that sound that "just works" but Ableton Live is excellent for sound design when you need to take a more DIY approach.

Spread Time And Midi Effects Across The Kit

Don't forget that each of the drum rack pads in Ableton Live is a full on effect rack!

Simply adding time effects to certain sounds can make the whole kit feel more interesting.

Time effects are things like reverbs, delays, and chorus. Some kind of process happens over time to the sound. As opposed to amplitude effects like compression or EQ.

Give the MIDI effects some love too! A fun example is to set your hi hat sound on a few different drum pads with arpeggiators set to different rates, like 1/8th notes, triplets (1/12), and 1/16th notes. Then you just hold down the pad on your controller and it auto triggers.

Copy The Stock Drum Racks (sort of)

A lot of people aren't super excited by the stock drum racks that ship with Ableton Live, but you can learn quite a bit, but picking apart the techniques used to construct them.

This isn't so much a specific technique, but a way of going about studying another sound designer's work and making it your own.

For example, you could start by opening 10 drum racks and analyze each of the individual drum rack's return chains—you can radically shape sounds with just these—and try using similar techniques in your own racks.

Map Some Macro Controls

Macro controls in Ableton Live are really well done and you should use them. Automate them. Map an LFO to twist them for you. Map them to a controller and twist.

The beauty here is you can can easily create some very complex mappings that are much more time consuming to make in other DAWs.

Tip: Map a bunch of device parameters to a Macro and set different range limits on each parameter using the map menu. When you turn the Macro controls, each individual parameter will move at different rates. This can create some wild results!

Mix In Texture, Tones, Other Samples

Just because its called a drum rack doesn't mean you are obligated to use only drum sounds.

A better, but more awkward name for a drum rack is a signal flow rack. Each pad can have a really complicated chain of effects and MIDI effects before the sample.

Or you can not use a sample at all. Get this:

You can drag a whole synth VST like Wavetable, Operator, or even 3rd party plugins onto a drum pad and trigger it.

This is one of those mind-blowing features of Live the first time you see it.

You can have several pads trigger melodic sequences, chords, whatever you want. When you trigger your midi controller, you're just sending a note to a chain that you can process like any other MIDI note.

(When you load an empty drum rack, each pad is labeled with the MIDI note it sends)

Get Wild With Return Chains

Most producers use send and returns on tracks in the Arrangement view of Ableton for things like reverb and delay effects, but remember you can have returns that are contained within an individual drum rack.

In this way, a single drum rack is like a mini DAW within your DAW!

Delay and reverb are the usual place to start for blending in effects, but experiment with more drastic effects like the native Corpus effect or any of the new Live 11 Spectral effects like the Spectral Resonator or Spectral Time plugins.

If you have a lot of 3rd party plugins that are good for sound design (we like what Unfiltered Audio is doing, fantastic plugins) this is another place to get busy.

You can have up to 6 return chains in a drum rack. So it's possible to turn that into a lot of action with just a single midi clip playing a quarter note over and over in a single track by throwing it through your returns.

Use Choke Groups In Your Drum Rack Chains

A choke group is usually used as a practical way of making sure similar sounds don't trigger as the same time. You might not want two different snares to trigger at the same time, or more typically, you want a closed hat sound to cut off an open hat sound, like a real life drummer.

The way you do this is put the elements in the same choke group. You can have a bunch of them too. Snares might be in choke group 1, hi hat in choke group 2, and so on. You can have up to sixteen choke groups within a drum rack.

This is especially useful if you're playing in notes from a midi controller or converting and audio track into a MIDI track. In both cases, the MIDI data will likely be kind of messy.

Choke groups help save you the time of having to go through the entire clip note by note with a fine tooth comb.

Use Pan Automation On Certain Drum Sounds

The next two items go hand in hand because they have to do with the sense of space in your drum rack. Let's start with the simpler of the two: don't leave those pan sliders untouched!

While it's ideal if your drum rack works completely in mono, panning some elements around helps give it a more open feeling. Here are a few panning strategies to try:

• Pan cymbals or tonal sounds slightly left and right, just to get them off each other

• Do an LCR style pan. Everything in the drum rack gets panned center, hard right, or hard left.

• Use the Autopanner plugin to create some motion around the kit. Things like snares and kicks should probably stay centered, but hi hats, cymbals, percussion and generally higher sounding elements lend themselves well to this.

Create an Interesting Stereo Image In Your Drum Racks

Panning is certainly a part of this, but its always good to take a step back and think of ways to spice up the overall stereo image of the drum rack.

What does this actually mean? Through sample selection or use of plugins to manipulate samples, you want to have a variety of events in the stereo field. Have some samples that are totally mono, like perhaps a snare.

Then complement that with really wide stereo sounds. Then something between the two. Then a sound that autopans from right to left. Or use stock plugins to build a device chain that only widens the midrange.

The sky is the limit here, especially if you combine creative stereo activity with other audio effect racks that use other stereo effects.

If you really want to go nuts, you can use multiple parallel chains of effects and set the on/off switches to different ranges on Macro controls to scroll through them quickly.

Utilize Random Sample Playback

It's always interesting to build drum racks with some element of randomness incorporated into the design.

A common example of this is a simple round robin playback. This is when you tell a drum pad to not play back the same sample two times in a row.

You can use round robin sampling with a set of 4-5 slightly different samples to achieve a more realistic playing experience, like a real drum. Or you can try loading in a few really different samples so you don't really know what sound the drum pad will throw at you next.

The standard way to do this in Ableton Live is to use nested drum racks. You open a drum rack, then put another drum rack on that pad. Then you add instances of Simpler on the nested drum rack and place the Random MIDI effect before it.

Use The following settings on the Random plugin:

Chance should be 100%, Choices should be the same as the number of samples you want to round robin, the Mode needs to be set to Alt, Sign should be Add, Scale must be 1. You will also need a Pitch plugin set to -24 before the Random plugin.

Go back and re-read that as many times as you need to figure it out. You can make extremely realistic multi-sampled drum kits like this that you will be able to use over and over again.

If you got it right, you'll see a bunch of separate chains in the list and you'll see playback jump all over the chain list when triggered with MIDI notes.

This is exactly how our GRITMATTER pack is constructed which is a blend of realism and glitchy, unpredictable stuff.

Optimize Your Workflow In Ableton When Creating Drum Kits

Sometimes when you're building instrument racks or audio effect racks, its easy to lose momentum just because your workflow is too clunky and slow. Or you aren't organized and lose things a lot after you build them.

Making a system for yourself and utilizing the existing workflow tools will only help you get to making music faster.

Use Those Hot Swap Buttons!

Quickly swap out a drum sound or anything else. Generally when you're working with computers, the less time you spend fishing around with the mouse, the better.

In music production there's always some amount of that, but the hot swap button is designed to save you time on tedious drag and drops from the brower menu. Instead, you can just use the keyboard to scroll through sounds and quickly try them out while you play or while a MIDI note loops.

Memorize Keyboard Shortcuts Wherever Possible

It's so important it's worth repeating: try to avoid fishing around with the mouse when you can. Using a mouse is tedious, but a keyboard is not. If you find yourself reaching for the mouse a lot to do something in a menu for a particular task, look up the keyboard shortcut or make a new one in the operating system if it doesn't exist.

This one tip alone will save you hours of time over the course of a few months or years making music.

Use A Naming Convention

Its totally fine and encouraged to give your drum racks ridiculous names like BOOTY-DROP-HIP-HOP-GRAMMY-WINNER or whatever you want, but having a consistent system will only help you.

Including genre or tempo information is helpful, but if you do nothing else, you should put your name at the end of everything you make. This makes it really easy to find stuff you made, even if you aren't the most organized person.

Can't find that kit you made last month? Just search your name to narrow it down.

Manipulate Samples First

Sometimes it's good to do some sound design and come up with some ideas before you even open the drum rack. Just make weird sounds with no real goal and worry about organizing it later.

This is a particularly good tactic if you have limited time to work on music, but aren't feeling super creative or motivated. First, it lowers the bar of success. You're not trying to make a full drum rack, the goal is just make some sounds. Can be anything.

Just getting moving on something can sometimes inspire you to take it further and get you into a state of flow where the ideas just come. And if not, you have a bunch of sounds you can export and just file away for later.

Even Out The Volume Level

This is a super boring old-school engineer thing to say, but take a look at volume levels! Sometimes the actual sounds are fine but if your levels are out of whack you drums racks won't feel good to play or listen to.

This might be as simple as just muting everything, then one by one enabling the drum pads and dialing in the volume as you go. Sometimes having everything on is too crazy to deal with all at once.

If the levels are still all over the place, you can always try putting a compressor & limiter at the end of the chain to even things out.

Saturation & Clipping Are A Drum Rack's Best Friend

A lot of green producers think of distortion like a guitar distortion pedal. Like a switch that either clicks all in or all out.

However a good mix engineer will be the first one to tell you there are many, many flavors of saturation or distortion that help add depth and bite to your rack. In mixing, we can often get away clipping the living daylights out of drums and it sounds great.

However in the production phase we're often working to create something novel or interesting.

A great way to do that is create a complex saturation situation across the whole kit. Have some elements that are totally blasted to bits leveled with very clean elements. Any maybe some parallel chains that mix in distortion with a totally clean sound.

Keep All The Samples The Same, But Try A Slightly Different Layout

This one mostly applies to people playing parts in from an MPC controller or keyboard.

Arranging the drum sounds in a different pattern will make you play them differently. The performance interface is a big deal. Sometimes just finding a physical layout that works for you makes all the difference.

If you really want to get wild with an instrument rack, map all 88 keys of a piano or synth randomly all over the keyboard. It will be weird and you won't be able to rely on your usual chops. It will force you to explore and this can be a good thing when you're bored and feel stuck in the same old patterns.

Start With A Boring Factory Kit and Modify It

If you're really, truly stuck you can always open up some stock drum rack patches and modify them to better fit your needs.

You'll still learn by picking apart what the original sound designer did and discover your own preferences along the way.

One Final Tip

There are a lot of things to try here. Don't try to do everything here in a day! You could easily experiment for a week or two (or much longer!) just with one of the many tactics listed in this article.