The Drum Rack is a flexible MPC-style sampler for Ableton. Amongst other things, it’s ideal for housing 1-shot samples and creating drum kits. You can also input custom effects and processors directly within in the rack itself.
Let’s take a look at how to put together a drum kit using samples from Ableton’s library.
Loading Samples Into Drum Rack
Ableton provides a huge library of 1-shot drum samples. You can easily audition them in Ableton’s browser. Go to Samples > Waveforms > Drums and begin to pick out samples of your choosing.
For demonstration purposes, let’s pick out a kick, clap, and hi-hat to create a simple hip hop kit. You can expand on this kit at another time using the same methods described in this article.
Drag and drop those samples onto the drum pads in your Drum Rack.
You can trigger these drums pads by clicking on the play icon within each pad, using your computer keyboard, or via MIDI keyboard (permitted you have one).
Adding Effects To Individual Samples
The Drum Rack gives you the ability to add effects to individualized samples. This is ideal when you want to add certain effects to certain samples, rather than global effects that affect the entire Drum Rack.
Highlight your clap in the Chain Selector and then drop a Reverb on the effects insert of that chain. You’ll notice that only the clap is affected by the Reverb.
Note: The Chain Selector allows you to micromanage your collection of samples. You can adjust the volume and panning information of each sample. You can also solo/mute samples or Hot Swap them out.
Tweaking Samples in Sampler
For each sample you import into Drum Rack a Sampler will be added. This allows you to tweak the actual sample in various ways. The detailed editing of Sampler lets you change the pitch, envelope, start and stop points, and more.
The Drum Rack can hold up 128 samples. However, we’d avoid putting that many in there. The downside to having a Sampler to handle each sample is that a Drum Rack loaded with 128 samples contains 128 Samplers. That kind of processing eats CPU’s for breakfast. Ideally, you don’t want much more than 30 or 40 samples per Drum Rack.
Adding Global Effects
You can add Global Effects to your Drum Rack just as you normally would. Let’s add some Compression to fatten up our kit. Simply drag and drop a compressor onto the track (outside of the Rack). You might want to spice it up with some EQ as well.
Saving Your Kit
Once you have a drum kit tweaked to your liking, you’ll want to save this kit so you can access it at a later date. Click on the file icon and you’ll be redirected to name the kit in your file browser. Give it a name that makes sense. As you start to build your own kits you’ll want to stay organized.
Summary
The Drum Rack is a powerful tool. Don’t limit yourself to drum sounds. You can load in FX, loops, vocal cuts and more. Although our kit only contains 3 samples, you’ll want to make it more complete by including percussion, toms, etc.
You can organize your kits in different ways as well. Try creating a Drum Rack that includes all of your favorite snares. Save that Drum Rack and you’ll potentially save yourself some time in future productions.
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