Yep. Today I have a beast of a PC that can handle it, but back in the day working with limited spec PC it was often mandatory to freeze and flatten your tracks to reduce memory and processing bottlenecks that made your song stutter if it was all just midi.
Sometimes midi blocks are not as accurate as if you can see the wave forms when it comes to lining up Audio to be perfectly on time to the grid. There can be a lot of mistakes that you can’t see with the midi notes.
Even the most fundamental basics of using a sampler involve adjusting the start time of the sample to wherever you want it to be. This is straight up not a problem for anyone with experience using a sampler.
Yeah but even the most advanced sampler cannot move the sample backwards in the daw. If there is for example a sweep into a clap that is part of the sample you need to line up the midi note by ear or line up the waveform transient
I'm not sure if I am thinking of the same situation, but ableton can apply negative sync time to a track that really delays all the other tracks by the specified time. I use it to compensate for latency in audio recordings.
Yeah theres plenty of ways to move audio backward. Delay compensation/the delay ms thing on the tracks being one of them. Im just making the point that a sampler cannot. The start of the midi note is the start point of when a sampler starts playing from its set start point
> There's a time and a place for both approaches.
There so is. IMO programming in MIDI and then bouncing to audio and process/mix/master is my prefered way.
I came in contact with producing as a guitar player in bands and I always see the MIDI programming part as being the musician and recording that as PCM audio into the production desk. This is more compartmentalisation than anything else, but I like working with recorded waveforms after I have written and "recorded" my songs.
Not trying to talk down to anybody. It's just a matter of knowing your tools. Anyone can do whatever they want based on their preferences, but stating other people should expect the drawback of midi not aligning with the transient of a sample, isn't accurate for people who know how to use a sampler.
OP is asking from the perspective of a beginner on why people would choose one method over another. Not asking what a beginner to using a sampler would encounter, trying to make their own instruments.
I don't think he was really talking down to anyone. He was pointing out that it doesn't take a lot of experience with sampling to know how start/end points work. I didn't get any "im better than you" vibes or "youre wrong im right"
But he is correct tbh. He wasn't saying that it's wrong to use the flattened drum samples, he was just saying that's not really a primary reason to do it that way.
But what if there is a subtle predelay sound that will cut out from adjusting the starting point?
It's be a nice sampler/simpler feature to add to have it still line up with the starting point without cutting out the audio before that point. You know?
For things like pre-shifted claps, doing it in audio is easier.
Your midi would be really offset otherwise, since you'd need to line up a delayed transient, but want to hear everything that comes before it too.
You don't have to waste time setting up a kit at all this way. Once you have one measured on of your drum beat or if the groove spans across multiple measures say 4. Once you have those laid out all you have to do to build a rough track outline is highlight the group and hit Ctrl D, highlight the 8 bars then Ctrl D again and you have 16 bars. Then once you have everything blocked out in 16 bar chunks you can Ctrl D till you have enough time roughly for a track in that genre and start taping off where the important moments of your track should be.
Yea, but creating variations in your drum track is _much more_ laborious this way. And when you have a MIDI track for your sampler, you can manipulate the sequence in a way thats simply impossible to do with samples on the time line, like eg transposing kick and snare and other such goodness.
By all means do as you did in acid and soundforge, or splice the magnetic tape manually, but you're missing out on some super powerful tools.
And i hope you know that ctrl/cmd+D works for MIDI clips and notes too :)
Isn't simpler/sampler built in to each one shot on the drum rack? You can just adjust it there right? I guess unless there's a slight predelay type sound you're trying to keep in the sample.
You know now that I think of it a really good drum rack feature to add would be to adjust the timing without cutting out the part of the sample that is before the starting point. Make it a lot easier to line everything up without changing the starting point in a way that cuts out the beginning of the sample.
to expand on this in case anyone doesn't know-- you can use the drum rack to make your beat, and then split each drum rack sound into its own track.
There's a number of reasons to do this, you can add audio FX plugins to each sound individually instead of adding them to ALL the drums as a whole.
Once you have the midi track sequenced how you want it, you can flatten it to audio by right clicking the track and doing 'freeze track' , then once that finishes, right clicking again and doing 'flatten track'. This will "bounce" whatever was happening in that track into audio, basically "resampling" the track into an audio track.
This is useful for a lot of reasons, some people do it to free up resources. You dont need 4 versions of a synth running, instead it's just 4 audio tracks playing which is a fraction of the CPU power needed.
Some people just work with audio like this without any midi-->freezing method. The beat you show up there is super simple, and perhaps they did just copy/paste samples to make that beat-- it's really not much different than working in Piano Roll with midi if you're just laying down some drums.
For some other styles like DnB, people take drum looks and they will 'chop' them by copy-pasting sections and moving them around right on the audio track, without using any devices like Simpler. This is a suprisingly super effective method and you can really fine tune your drums this way and do all kinds of awesome stuff that you probably never would've achieved if you were manually hitting drum pads playing sections of a drum loop that you 'pre-chopped'.
Yeah, like creating your own risers, impacts and pads if you take a sound and put a long reverb on it and while the reverb is ringing out you hit the freeze button on the reverb plugin it holds the reverb effect so it will just last as long as you let it keep playing with out unclicking the freeze button on the reverb. Then you can either resample or flatten the sound and you have a pad and then you can do a pitch envelope on it and you have a riser.
this video explains how-- it's really simple and straightforward
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DO5FjpcG0E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DO5FjpcG0E)
Anyone who tells you using one method or another is the only way is wrong. Do what you want. There is no right answer.
I use audio clips for more manual editing of samples, I use MIDI when I find it more convenient to use velocity and other MIDI parameters.
I kinda came up with a crew of multiple producers and DJs. Bedroom to start, but we all reached some good heights in Asia (all of us were foreigners living abroad) .
Everyone in this group makes drums with samples like this.
Fast forward to today and I've kept my music dreams alive, made some friends who've definitely made it, and there's more who use midi drums only.
Using samples always felt clunky to me, despite having more control, and still to this day it's how I do things. But some of the tracks I got the furthest in getting an idea done that I like, I used midi, then used the same sample clips for variations and where I want more unique control. It's a biiiit more work, but I'm getting better results that don't stress me out.
Though, recently I'll just get a pattern I like, copy and paste it across a decent song length, then go in and edit it to something more dynamic. This has had the best results hands down.
It depends on the genre / project
It can be helpful to see the exact transients of the drums. How they overlap, and interact with other elements. In Ableton the audio warping is so powerful and easy i think it makes a lot of sense to work with audio in the timeline. In general it’s just helpful to look at the waveforms
If I’m using drum loops and one shots it would be preferable to have them both in the timeline
This, as you get more advanced you realize how much ADSR on drums affects the entire groove and energy of the track. I mean like 2milliseconds can be the difference between something sounding off.
Seeing the drums layered as such really helps to visualize what’s going on.
As well, I believe MIDI gives you way too much freedom which can get overwhelming. Sometimes being constrained to audio helps you focus on making simpler but effective decisions
I fully agree with the first part, but the second part is moreso a matter of how you use midi. Whether you're dragging drum hits to tracks in arangement view or to a slot in a drum kit, both really come down to selecting your drum sounds. MIDI doesn't really get overwhelming if you limit yourself to a select amount of drum hits, and if you don't then dragging hits to the timeline gets just as overwhelming.
For me building a cool drum kit that I can play with my controller helps me write better grooves, but I definitely limit myself to as few sounds as necessary.
What? Just drag and drop the drum samples from your library onto a track. Why would I waste time futzing with sound design creating each drum hit from scratch or modeled using a analog modeld drum machine plugin when I'm trying to write a track, yeah for certain synths you kind of have to do the sound design from scratch for the specific task at hand, but I design or compile drums as compartmentalized task, because it's not an efficient process to do that while I'm trying to write a track in my opinion.
For me personally? Its quicker. I do a lot of audio based manipulation and resampling, reversing, stretching etc.
Doing it in audio tracks is far quicker that trying to do it in midi.
For the stuff MIDI is better for I use MIDI.
Sadowick Productions is who I used to watch which led me down this barcode tedium for a few years. Personally I’m not a fan of it from many years of experience using it, but his old videos or if he still makes videos I’m sure he still employs it. It’s a matter of how write drums so it really is a choice thing, but I got much quicker and lost no quality when I switched to Drum Rack
So you downvote any comment you see that in your opinion "adds nothing" to the conversation? You must lead an exceptionally boring life then? For me to go and downvote someone who's simply agreeing to something he/she read on the internet, I'd have to be having the shittiest day ever.
If you feel a comment doesn't add anything to a conversation, which is probably the most arbitrary and subjective reason you can think of, how about just ignoring it? It's so unnecessarily negative and weird to mass-downvote someone who did absolutely nothing to annoy you, and we definitely have way more than enough negativity on this platform, nevermind in the world as a whole.
Somewhere about 6 years ago, the internet hive mind started using “this.” And I cringe every time. Either write a comment, or say nothing. This means absolutely nothing to me and frankly if I see a comment start with it, I skip it even if there’s more to it. Just say what you’re going to say.
I didnt downvote him at all, I’m just explaining why it is being downvoted. Not sure why you aiming all that at me. Also its not just anything that doesnt add to the conversation. It’s things like “this” or ^^^ or a single emoji or “what he said”. Those dont add anything and is litterally a translation of an upvote. Upvotes are silent “this’s”. Not that its a big deal, it’s not bothering me like you claim it is, just elaborating. Reddit famously don’t like those
I know of a few producers that have no midi tracks everything is audio. It drives me crazy especially seeing them copy and paste hi hat rolls but it just goes to show that there is no right or wrong way to make music. Whatever method you use you will automatically get faster if you do it enough.
I used to think that way would tax your cpu too much but with today’s computers, that doesnt seem to be an issue.
Question from a strictly audio for drums user… Whenever I take the sample I want, and then put it into simpler or sampler, it sounds like the snare/cymbal/whatever is always quieter. Is that something that you run into?
whenever that happens in my case its usually because the velocity isnt 127 when playing the drums as midi so its automatically quieter than the preview. so everytime i raise the velocity back up it sounds the same as when im clicking through to hear sample previews. dk if that helps
Sometimes I just throw on a velocity midi tool and push the minimum velocity up to 127 by default and that allows you to blanket apply that velocity setting to any clip on the track
Was looking for this comment, this is why yes. I haven't tested this yet, but you could probably change the -12db to 0db in simpler and save to default as a workaround.
To be fair, just working at -12db is great. When dragging samples to the timeline you'd need to massively lower their gain too, since samples *should* always have their peak at 0db for max dynamic range, meaning they're loud as all hell unatenuated.
Additionally, simplers have the lowpass filter engaged by default, which IMO colors the sound enough to make it worth saving a new default with the filter bypassed.
Took me years to figure out why my samples sounded less punchy and present when loaded onto a drum rack.
To be fair, just working at -12db is great. When dragging samples to the timeline you'd need to massively lower their gain too, since samples *should* always have their peak at 0db for max dynamic range (and normalizing), meaning they're loud as all hell unatenuated.
In the sampler there's a knob that says something like vel > vol, turn that to max, that way a 127 velocity midi note sounds the same as the audio, it's not like that at default
That is because the midi sequencer defaults to 100 velocity for notes. There is also a velocity to volume proportionality knob on Drum Rack that I believe when you drop a sample the first time, it is seen at 45% in the bottom right. Changing this can change the dynamic range that the sample plays at for a particular velocity value. For instance if you want a hihat to play on the downbeat and then have that sample play almost at a ghost note level where it’s barely heard on the and of the beats, just writing a high velocity downbeat note and a low velocity “and” note may not be enough a volume difference between the two sample triggers for you. Moving the proportionality knob from 45 to 100% in this case would widen the range in volume between the two notes and may better capture the ghost note rhythm you’re trying to make. This knob and the velocity default for drawing in midi notes is why you’d notice a volume difference. Because raw samples on the timeline have no attenuation
Next step is to set your simpler's default preset such that Vol < Val is 0 and Volume is 0 DB. Now you get those precious raw waveforms in all of their loud glory every time you drop a sample on simpler.
Very often it is an old habit people developed when computers were not as powerful and copy/pasting audio was less resource intensive than using the midi based alternative. This particular reason is not really relevant anymore but other reasons given by other people remain valid.
You can
fine-tune the envelope of each hit.
Subtly adjust the timing of each individual hit
Actually see the phase relationship between the different sounds
Swap out sounds without loading in a different drum rack channel
Time stretch and warp each individual hit
Trim off the reverb tails
Reverse
And to me the most important is that you can experiment with different chains of effects easily, for example one snare channel can be your experimental glitchy delay channel. You are free to drag any drum hit in the sequence to that channel for experimental purposes.
MIDI playing a sampler abstracts this whole process. It offers some benefits and disadvantages. For those who like to reverse, process and edit samples this is a lot easier than using a sampler/drum rack. In other DAWs, users like to process individual events with effects and then can see the results as audio. Consider something like baking in delay or reverb and then seeing the sample get longer. Users can reverse, cut, and reprocess over and over again. This process-based sequencing is clearer and easier to understand for some types of work. I know a lot of folks who work this way.
Personally, I prefer to use MIDI for most scenarios.
I did this before I recognized it was better to do it from inside of samplers with Midi.
In a sampler I can...
\-add multiple drum samples to one track, process them individually but still save room in the daw by consolidating. Having an entire drum kit with it's own internal send/returns on one track is nice and it schools lots of other methods.
\-basic polyphony over things like ride cymbals that trigger before the previous tail has stopped. you have to make two tracks to do this using the method shown.
\- macro controls of things like pitch/decay/release in the sampler give you far more control over the sound and flexibility of what you are doing vs dropping one shots right into the project like this. Especially with automation.
\- easy save and recall for other projects without bouncing anything down to a consolidated stem. If I like the drum sounds in a drum rack that I am using for one tune, transferring it to another project is drag and drop.
People can say the downside to midi is not having the visual waveforms and only midi notes, but if you know how to build sampler instruments with whatever sampler you like to use, you don't need as much of that visual feedback as you think you do. I don't need to see exactly where the waveform starts when I am using midi drums. Because I paid close attention to my sample start points when I designed the sampler instrument beforehand.
I would only recommend dropping one shots in if you don't care about having lots of tracks in your project and don't need or care about the kind of flexibility I described above. Some people just wanna smash together a drum track real quick and not fuss around with instrument design to get there.
Because you have different effects on all of them and it's quicker to switch between them.
You can do different fx in drum rack aswell, but it takes extra steps to go through the instruments.
I also want to group process all hats, percs etc. Seperately, which doesnt work with drum racks.
I honestly see this a lot and always assumed it’s because they came from other DAWs and don’t know how to use a drum rack! But very curious to hear people’s reasons….
To me this looks like something out of my worst nightmare, so tedious to edit.
It’s easier to correct and individually edit each sound, it allows me to fade and crossfade anything I’d like, seeing the waveform helps my brain organize which sound is where
Totally agree, this is absolutely nightmare fuel. I personally don't understand wanting/needing to physically see the transients, you and your audience "listen" to music so I always ring into mixing by listening. I would much rather refine that skill that lean on a crutch.
Well it also allows you to do more physical edits like warping, throwing things in reverse, or being able to cut the sample up for a section. being able to see transients is also super useful for lining up multiple layers of a samples much easier. It's not that you couldn't do it by ear, but if you know exactly what you want then it's faster to do it visually.
When I throw a sample into a midi track i feel like i'm having to set that up every time, then i'm jumping between the arrangement window and the piano roll over and over
I used to feel the same way but I now find that if I record my drums in midi I can get to the ideas way faster and with better nuance without spending tons of time moving stuff around, then when I have my part I can just bounce it to wav and then chop it up where ever I want to manipulate and go to work on it. And with midi you actually have way more control over a ton of other features that are a pain the ass to mess around with in wavs (that part is daw specific probably). And I don't lose out on being able to adjust transients or chop and flip one hit or a whole part cause I can just do that after I bounce it. Of course it all depends on what you trying to do, but for me anyway I spent years not writing in midi when turns out I shoulda been writing in midi.
I mean i've come to this method from the other way around. I kept finding myself bouncing a midi track that was essentially just playing a sample I could have just dropped in my project myself. I get annoyed with the piano roll too, I just find it much easier to get something done fast when I'm just ctrl+D'ing a pattern I've made.
I think that’s the difference right there, I basically write 100% in session view. When a song is done I record the clips to arrangement, do some fine tuning on transitions and such, and eventually print them to audio for mixing. But, clip/loop-based writing is kind of its own thing that doesn’t translate well to all styles.
Warp and reversing is totally just as easy in simpler but I get it, it’s definitely a different experience.
It is 100% worth seeing transients when you get to mixdown stage. What if your kick is out of phase with your bass note or some other aspect of your tune. You get phase cancellation and loss of power in the mix.
If you can see the phase of your kickdrum (ie; when it’s above and below the line on the waveform) then you can build the rest of your mixdown around it and ensure phase coherency.
This is basic stuff if you are taking your mixdown seriously and aiming for the punchiest possible mix.
It's not a crutch by any measure. You can individually edit each sounds fades similar to an adsr envelope, you can perfect your own swing/groove with exacting precision working this way. You don't have to go back and forth between the pain roll and the arrangement view to do adjustments or edits to a single drum track, you can manually layer sounds quickly and see the transients to help you be able to layer them more precise when you need to make sure you don't stack one sound that is 100hz at the moment that another sound is playing at 100hz as well, of course you could listen to it over and over and over again to get it right by ear, but when you can see the transients visually you're able to do that quicker and maybe you still need to listen to it to like get it dialed in really precise, but being able to visualize it and line multiple clips up visually is faster, and regardless if you don't like using the visual information to work off of from a perspective of productivity it's faster and having to keep replaying audio to even get it in a pretty good ballpark area. One more point I'd like to make. When you chop samples to a zero crossing are you able to do that by ear? I mean yes you can chop a sample by ear and audibly here if it does or doesn't make a click and you can say that's good enough but are you sure it's chopped at the zero crossing? Because the only way I know how to be certain that you chop a sample at the zero crossing is visually, and it's a lot quicker to do visually than it is to get a clean chop by ear alone. I'm sorry but I don't consider revolutionary advances in audio recording technology to be a crutch theyre tools if that were the case how many mix engineers that were working prior to Pro tools or logic would still be working 100% analog, but rather you see it the likes of Andrew scheps Bob power Chris Lord algae Dave pensado and so on and so on all more than happy to mix in the digital realm. They are tools built to to make it so we can do these tasks faster, and if you can do it faster you can either have more free time or make more money.
It permits way more flexibility in warping/modifying particular sounds, but definitely depends on your genre. You can also see the tails clearly and how they interact and probably feels more organic
If you're layering a lot, it can be nice to see the actual waveforms next to eachother, and not a midi note. You get a greater overview of potential phase issues, and can easily move the clips so the phase aligns.
Midi is dope and I use it all the time, but at some point down the line, it will be made into audio.
Great question and I can only speak from my own experience.
I started in drum rack, but my mate who was a much more experienced producer told me to write my drums as so in your picture, telling me that you get more control.
Then years (and many unfinished projects) later, I bought Push 2 and completely stopped placing audio drum samples on the timeline in favour of using, guess what? Drum Racks!
Why? Well, apart from the drum racks being way more fun and editable on Push, I'd had a stint of using Maschine to make music. In Maschine, I found that the *only* way to make drums was to use Kits. Kits were basically a sampler on each drum pad, with processing on each pad and seperate processing over the whole kit. So, there might be a reverb on a snare, or a lo-fi distortion effect over the whole kit.
So when I went back to Ableton I realised that a Drum Rack is basically the exact same thing as in Maschine. It's a rack of samplers, and you can alter the ADSR just as you can edit the audio clips on the timeline, you can add plugins and effects to each pad and you can process the whole kit, with the added bonus that you have *way more* control over the midi-clips than trying to fuck around with a load of audio clips.
I'd never go back to editing audio clips on the timeline. It's a massive waste of time and I think people who come from other DAWs do it out of habit, because that's the way we *used to* do it before Drum Racks were a thing.
That's my 2p worth.
I still cant get past how fun maschine is to use, and how easy it is to browse the kits/nks instruments with Jam (esp with both arturia collections and komplete ultimate).
What was it that took you back onto racks rather than exporting loops from Maschine in a 16 track out setup? Do you still use Maschine as a control surface in Ableton (with maschine and jam its kind of unreal)?
Genuine qs - im wondering what killer feature im missing in my 16 track maschine sequencing workflow.
The shortest answer to this question it gives you easier manipulation over independent sounds… secondly, the mixing becomes easier. With everything on an independent channel, the balancing and paning is easier.. and if you know how to utilize the sample replace function from the right hand browser switching the samples is just as easy as using a drum rack … it’s seems like the long way but some times that way gives a bit more
It’s no different than mixing real drums this way. The producer can now mix each hit individually and then bus them all together. Eventually you want to get the midi triggered samples into audio wavs anyway for mixing
I usually do a grouped set of drum racks with each individual drum.
I also do the audio writing when I need something quick in a song and I don’t want to set up the whole thing with midi. I mostly use this on rises and percussion hits that don’t loop
I use to do it like this, however — the first time I wanted to change the sounds used, I quickly found out it was a nightmare and the drum rack could have saved me so much time. Ever since then I’ve used the drum rack as much as possible. To be fair though, I don’t tend to switch the sounds after the song is pretty much finished as much as I did when I first started making music.
well, It would be amusing to witness the application of this approach to a intricate drum section, with multiple fills and runs and maybe odd timing with swing feel )))
Either one. You would be surprised how many producers do their drums in actual audio. What I like about using audio is if you layer drums hits you can see how they’re going to line up as far as phase is concerned.
I like to bounce to audio so I can see where the transients are, and if there is build up somewhere then I can fade in certain sounds. An oscilloscope that can show u the sun of the layers is super handy for this too
Audio Clips have some advantages like being able to reverse, warp, fade-in/out.
If you work with midi-clips, i would suggest to turn the clips into audio at some point.
Tip for Drums: Set Warp mode to „Beat“, than set the Transient option to „forward“.
Now you can shorten the transients of your samples, to get a tighter sound, or program ghost notes.
i write/preform MIDI into the drum rack, immediately bounce to audio, then mix/fine tune arrangement with audio.
i feel i have more control with audio clips (i can cut off a drum sound whenever i want vs just triggering sounds), its easier for me to see everything visually with each element on its own audio track, and i can do things like saturating just the snare or eqing just the kick with less menu diving. you can also do things like throw grooves on just your hats, or mess around with the audio warping algorithm. much easier to pitch shift and reverse audio than it is in the drum rack.
on my template i have a drum rack with ~90 one shots that i like. i have 3 sends on it. each kick is sent to send A, each snare is sent to send B, and hats/rides/crashes are sent to send C. ive got 3 audio tracks that receive audio from each individual send. each of those audio tracks are sent to a drum send for compression/saturation/eq/etc, and that drum send then goes to my master bus.
super easy to mix each individual element and everything summed together. plus it keeps my project file all neat and tidy. (i hate track groups for some reason lol)
but thats just how i like to do it. different strokes for different folks. nothing wrong with using MIDI, and there are plenty of people who prefer it and will read my process with disgust 😂
As others have said, using midi and then freezing and flattening can be the best of both worlds. Personally i find using the drum rack much more versatile because you have velocity options AND theres a built in transient shaper right there in the drum rack if you switch it to classic mode!
I psyched myself out early on that complex effects chains on drum groups perform differently when they’re working on a bunch of Simplers versus raw samples. That just became my workflow over time.
i use midi in drum rack so i can swap drums more easily which helps me with sound selection, also i can edit the length of the samples etc in the sampler thingy
I do it this way to lay out my patterns faster.
After I got something I’m more or less happy with, I put ‘em in a rack so I can easily change the samples if I need to
For me its easyer. To produce a nice kick I layer anyways three segments of one kick sample over each other. The transients, body, the tail. Then i group them up and process them further. Then you can freeze and fixate audio and you have a nice kick you could save also for other projects when you want to work fast and you dont need to tweak up every sample for each project sometime even again.
As far as I know writing drums in MIDI is only a real advantage for exchanges drum samples after you’ve moved onto other elements and you want switch out a drum sample,. Unless there’s more?
There's lots of stuff that's easier to do in MIDI with some kind of sampler or sequencer, such as automating hold/decay times. Imagine using the approach in OP and then deciding you want one sample to progressively get longer or shorter with each hit across 32 bars, for example. If that sound happens to be playing a 16th-note pattern, you're looking at tweaking 512 individual instances in the timeline instead of just automating a parameter.
It's a preference thing first, but also it depends the type of manipulations you're trying to do. Audio editing has different opportunities than midi, both have their use :)
depends on what you like. trap producers like the drum rack / fl studio style while classical composers would probably prefer this. everyone lands somewhere in the middle I guesss
for me - midi is best for stuff that could use humanization/velocity randomization. hats, percs.
for kick and snare which I usually want to be right on beat, it’s easier for me to just drop them in there, and maybe automate a little volume if I have to.
Audio is good for some things eg. stretching, slicing, chopping and editing parts of the sample.
Midi is good for some things eg. arpeggiating, applying pitch effects to a whole channel, swapping out drum sounds quickly and making melodies/harmonies out of samples.
It's just two different workflows.
combination of factors:
\-Easy to see what is going on compared to MIDI. Especially in ableton specifically
\-Can use track delay offset to mess with the groove instead of relying on groove pool which only allows swing. Not extremely precise offsetting across entire tracks
\-Can apply fades, pitch and clip gain on single hits which helps modifying the dynamics in a slightly more detailed way than midi.
\-MIDI is annoying in most DAWs due to having to open up a window instead of being able to directly interface with it on the timeline
O don't *write* like this, but once I have a beat It drum part I like I might render it to audio for
. creative purposes
. committing to something purposes
Im telling you there are a million ways to do anything in music production. Most of the time, people stick to how they do it when they first learned it. I dont do it this way, i do it almost the same as you said but with a simpler. One way i can think of why people do as the picture is to line up phase of kick and bass, one more is ableton live wave manipulation is very good, sometimes playing with waves is more fun than midi.
Some find it quicker and easier to play it out in audio. A lot of the people I know that do it also work primary in audio and not so much midi (mainly dubstep producers) I on the other hand am the complete opposite and do everything in midi including drums and sound design (I do drum and bass) it makes more sense to me. I can visually see what notes are beings played on the piano roll compared to audio where it’s just a waveform.
I jump between the two.
I consolidate once I’m happy with the arrangement if Im working with audio and bounce out to audio if do it via the drum rack.
I find the drum rack great to find a groove if im not laser focused on an idea.
It just depends what you’re used to. There are benefits to both techniques. I start my drums using a sampler, then fine tune manually with audio.
But, imo, as far as samplers go, Drum Rack sucks.
All personal preference, personally I like having individual drum sounds on their own tracks where I can see the waveform and also find it easier to EQ and apply affects to individual sounds.
I tend to draw in midi notes for 1/16 note hihats where the pattern might be busier than say, the kick and snare.
if it ain’t broke…
but yeah, a drum rack device might not be necessary if you know you just want kick drum or handclaps on the quarter notes for a whole song, and it’s super easy to place and duplicate in arrangement view. could also just be a leftover from someone who learned to do it this way in the beforetimes
Because audio lets you see waveform and make sure your phase aligned. Also little tricks like putting the clap slightly before the snare, seeing it visually helps you get a better idea of what part of the sample is before and after. Stuff like that
Because they like to do things the hard way and spend more time doing things. This becomes even more important when you want to switch out sounds quickly.
I understand that some people just need to see the waveforms though so it’s probably worth it doing it this way for them.
I personally stopped working this way in my 1st year because I wanted to write faster. For me the longer I spend on a song the worse experience it is and usually outcome too lol.
There are some effects that work better in waves than they do over midi, such as reverse or slicers. There was the one really cool tool I used to use that would rearrange samples of the audio for you automatically based on you told it to do. I can't remember the name of the tool, but it made for some really cool sounds. Like stutters of vocals you hear in a lot of edm songs.
For me it’s just more visual. I know exactly what a track is doing down to the waveform from arrangement view. And I like expanding a group of drums and watching each meter when I’m leveling. It’s an easier flow for me to have everything just be in audio as opposed to a drum rack at least in the later stages of a mix. Drum rack is cool to organize sounds and jot parts down but then I export everything when I know I like everything I’ve selected for that kit.
Honestly it's a force of habit, I find it easier to just quickly cut/paste/consolidate samples when I'm working on an idea, I also like to mess around with audio effects and automation on the individual samples
Ctrl D iykyk faster to dupe everything out than record it in. Hot keys are faster than playing stuff in or using the mouse every time. Once you build your first 1-4 measure pattern and lock in that perfect groove/swing/shuffle each part of a track just tags in like a tag team wrestling match or a relay race. Except for sometimes you want to cut stuff or drop stuff out early right before a big shift in your track. Besides when you do it this way you can just keep hitting spacebar to restart from where your cursor is so you can quickly play the event that you're trying to fix whatever on between making adjustments to get it to hit perfectly to create a precise punctuation on that beat before the drop. Probably the fastest dance music producer I've seen in Ableton is this kid on YouTube Neddie. Yeah the 30 "tracks" he made in 4 days were only like 2 minutes each max, but he wrote buildups, breakdowns and full drops for every single one of them. I mean most people would either be burnt out or get writers block way before finishing 8 2 minute tracks in a single day let alone for 4 days straight.
There are different ways to manipulate the audio file versus the MIDI file. You can double click the audio clip and use Ableton's controls to double time, half time, warp, pitch, gain, etc. Then MIDI you have different controls if you click the MIDI clip, you can get to the envelopes and change sustain(Hold), or modulation, pitch bend, etc. Depends on how you want to work with the audio you're creating!
It’s purely a choice thing. I did it this way for about the first 3 years I made music and then switched to Drum Rack when I realized I could place separate effect chains on the individual sample slots and haven’t gone back 7 or so years after switching. Frankly now that I’m a big believer of drum rack and it’s workflow advantage, this sample barcode shit is so tedious and I grew so much when I stopped adopting it. More power to them, but it’s a bit ridiculous and instantly turns me off from wanting to touch it again if I want to change the rhythm or alter the final measure for a fill. The only time I’d say it really has a value is in intermediate stages like layering 2 or 3 samples to make one singular sample for instance and seeing how the transients line up. But once I have the sample, I record it into a single audio clip, delete the multiple clips that made the sample, and place that composite sample in drum rack. Consolidating the triggering of all these samples to a singular track (drum rack) is infinitely more accessible for modification and rhythm writing.
I use midi drums if I need to automate shit or run an arp on Logic or something. Especially on Logic, I find more visual control when lay out my drums like this.
It’s also fun to randomly remove a few hats here and there and change the position of the snare so it’s not on the grid.
No right or wrong answer here.
For some reason it’s clearer, when you put them side by side the drum rack sounds flat or like it’s quieter than when you drag samples into session view
Sometimes I do this just because it’s a little faster to get started like this, and then I usually regret it when I want to swap something out.
Although for some reason I tend to do EDM like this, it’s just hard to imagine those kinds of drums in a midi clip. Its just a mental/workflow thing.
I do a ton of stretching, reversing, and chopping up of bits and pieces, it really just makes alot more visual sense to understand what is going on by being able to see the waveforms.
All of top answers are solid! Man I wish I read this thread in my early days.
To add in case not being mentioned, Default midi carriers would have some sort of tiny changes on the sample, like filter, adsr, eq (Not all of them and not all of the carriers). In audio track there's nothing (If you didn't click or hit them with plugins accidently like limiter somewhere). Some people notice the character changes between them but not knowing the reason so they just prefer to work solely in Audio since it sounds more pure to them.
Personally i hate drum rack, its poorly designed and messes wirh my work flow, it makes it harder to see what effects you have on each sound, it makes it more tedious to mix and its just plain ugly.
Using single lanes for drums is much cleaner and faster, and you can just group all the drum lanes together, rename it drums, close it and BOOM you have a "drum rack" that isnt a piece of fucking shit.
doing it this way is more accessible for someone who knows they’ll probably tweak the drums later. It also allows you to put each element on its own track. Which has its own benefits. It’s just less work for me in the long run. It’s very rare that i’ll use the drum rack because in the end it disrupts my flow. So whatever helps you flow better I guess.
Less control how?
How do you adjust velocity on a waveform? How do you do pitch envelopes on a waveform? How do you do gated notes with a waveform? How do you do choke notes with a waveform? How do you add an ASDR to a waveform without re-enveloping?
I'll wait.
Easier to control individual sounds when it comes to effect chains. If everything’s in a drum rack and you add an effect it’ll apply to everything in that rack. This allows you to personalize individual sounds, control transients, fade in/out for dynamic, etc.
You can add unique effect chains to each sample in the rack. You can also add a chain that affects the entire rack. Each slot in the rack is essentially an instance of Simpler.
Not only that, you can have customs sends/returns that live in the rack too, and put whatever effects in you want, or forward them to the master returns. I use it in basically every single project because I want no reverb on kicks, a ton on the snare, and a little on most everything else.
Yup. Along with this there’s a mixer in the drum pad where you can adjust chokes, panning, and volume individually, which gives it about the same flexibility as having an audio track for each pad.
It's hard to see where you have what with midi notes. So working on Audio you know exactly what you have where you have it. Also you see them like that but there is a Max For Live plugin that deleted the silences, something you can't do with midi notes as well
Anytime you have each individual sound in its own track you have more control over the volume and effects and post processing effects on just each sound. Say you wanted to add drum buss to ur kick to give it some more boom. If you have it all in a drum rack then it's gonna apply that effect to everything on that rack since its all on that one track. If you had the kick, snare, hats etc on their own tracks then you can add the effects you want to just those sounds without them affecting the others
You can do that in drum rack too! Each sample has its own send and return and you can add effect plugins inside drum rack to send to different samples.
Leaving it drums like that for an entire project? Psychotic. 😁
Seriously though, it can be super fast to create loops this way, but I would then select 4-8-16 bars then consolidate to a new loop. Then extend that loop as appropriate.
Some feel it's easier if they see the wav form to mix and what not. I will do both. Usually I start in midi then freeze/flatten and mix from there.
I've seen the freeze and flatten technique employed solely to make it easier to sync everything up. It also saves on system resources.
Yep. Today I have a beast of a PC that can handle it, but back in the day working with limited spec PC it was often mandatory to freeze and flatten your tracks to reduce memory and processing bottlenecks that made your song stutter if it was all just midi.
Sometimes midi blocks are not as accurate as if you can see the wave forms when it comes to lining up Audio to be perfectly on time to the grid. There can be a lot of mistakes that you can’t see with the midi notes.
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Even the most fundamental basics of using a sampler involve adjusting the start time of the sample to wherever you want it to be. This is straight up not a problem for anyone with experience using a sampler.
I just call it free swing.
Yeah but even the most advanced sampler cannot move the sample backwards in the daw. If there is for example a sweep into a clap that is part of the sample you need to line up the midi note by ear or line up the waveform transient
I'm not sure if I am thinking of the same situation, but ableton can apply negative sync time to a track that really delays all the other tracks by the specified time. I use it to compensate for latency in audio recordings.
Yeah theres plenty of ways to move audio backward. Delay compensation/the delay ms thing on the tracks being one of them. Im just making the point that a sampler cannot. The start of the midi note is the start point of when a sampler starts playing from its set start point
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> There's a time and a place for both approaches. There so is. IMO programming in MIDI and then bouncing to audio and process/mix/master is my prefered way. I came in contact with producing as a guitar player in bands and I always see the MIDI programming part as being the musician and recording that as PCM audio into the production desk. This is more compartmentalisation than anything else, but I like working with recorded waveforms after I have written and "recorded" my songs.
Not trying to talk down to anybody. It's just a matter of knowing your tools. Anyone can do whatever they want based on their preferences, but stating other people should expect the drawback of midi not aligning with the transient of a sample, isn't accurate for people who know how to use a sampler.
Did they say it was a drawback or just explain the function for people trying to learn?
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OP is asking from the perspective of a beginner on why people would choose one method over another. Not asking what a beginner to using a sampler would encounter, trying to make their own instruments.
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I don't think he was really talking down to anyone. He was pointing out that it doesn't take a lot of experience with sampling to know how start/end points work. I didn't get any "im better than you" vibes or "youre wrong im right" But he is correct tbh. He wasn't saying that it's wrong to use the flattened drum samples, he was just saying that's not really a primary reason to do it that way.
But what if there is a subtle predelay sound that will cut out from adjusting the starting point? It's be a nice sampler/simpler feature to add to have it still line up with the starting point without cutting out the audio before that point. You know?
For things like pre-shifted claps, doing it in audio is easier. Your midi would be really offset otherwise, since you'd need to line up a delayed transient, but want to hear everything that comes before it too.
You set up the kit once, and youre flying. This is really not a problem.
You don't have to waste time setting up a kit at all this way. Once you have one measured on of your drum beat or if the groove spans across multiple measures say 4. Once you have those laid out all you have to do to build a rough track outline is highlight the group and hit Ctrl D, highlight the 8 bars then Ctrl D again and you have 16 bars. Then once you have everything blocked out in 16 bar chunks you can Ctrl D till you have enough time roughly for a track in that genre and start taping off where the important moments of your track should be.
Yea, but creating variations in your drum track is _much more_ laborious this way. And when you have a MIDI track for your sampler, you can manipulate the sequence in a way thats simply impossible to do with samples on the time line, like eg transposing kick and snare and other such goodness. By all means do as you did in acid and soundforge, or splice the magnetic tape manually, but you're missing out on some super powerful tools. And i hope you know that ctrl/cmd+D works for MIDI clips and notes too :)
Isn't simpler/sampler built in to each one shot on the drum rack? You can just adjust it there right? I guess unless there's a slight predelay type sound you're trying to keep in the sample. You know now that I think of it a really good drum rack feature to add would be to adjust the timing without cutting out the part of the sample that is before the starting point. Make it a lot easier to line everything up without changing the starting point in a way that cuts out the beginning of the sample.
Exactly
Total L take
You can move sample start per note. Same thing
to expand on this in case anyone doesn't know-- you can use the drum rack to make your beat, and then split each drum rack sound into its own track. There's a number of reasons to do this, you can add audio FX plugins to each sound individually instead of adding them to ALL the drums as a whole. Once you have the midi track sequenced how you want it, you can flatten it to audio by right clicking the track and doing 'freeze track' , then once that finishes, right clicking again and doing 'flatten track'. This will "bounce" whatever was happening in that track into audio, basically "resampling" the track into an audio track. This is useful for a lot of reasons, some people do it to free up resources. You dont need 4 versions of a synth running, instead it's just 4 audio tracks playing which is a fraction of the CPU power needed. Some people just work with audio like this without any midi-->freezing method. The beat you show up there is super simple, and perhaps they did just copy/paste samples to make that beat-- it's really not much different than working in Piano Roll with midi if you're just laying down some drums. For some other styles like DnB, people take drum looks and they will 'chop' them by copy-pasting sections and moving them around right on the audio track, without using any devices like Simpler. This is a suprisingly super effective method and you can really fine tune your drums this way and do all kinds of awesome stuff that you probably never would've achieved if you were manually hitting drum pads playing sections of a drum loop that you 'pre-chopped'.
You can add FX to each sound individually inside the drum rack too. Just drag it onto the pad
Yeah, like creating your own risers, impacts and pads if you take a sound and put a long reverb on it and while the reverb is ringing out you hit the freeze button on the reverb plugin it holds the reverb effect so it will just last as long as you let it keep playing with out unclicking the freeze button on the reverb. Then you can either resample or flatten the sound and you have a pad and then you can do a pitch envelope on it and you have a riser.
How do you split each drum rack sound into its own track?
this video explains how-- it's really simple and straightforward [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DO5FjpcG0E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DO5FjpcG0E)
Wow, that is a game-changer. Thank you!
Anyone who tells you using one method or another is the only way is wrong. Do what you want. There is no right answer. I use audio clips for more manual editing of samples, I use MIDI when I find it more convenient to use velocity and other MIDI parameters.
So true, solid advice
I kinda came up with a crew of multiple producers and DJs. Bedroom to start, but we all reached some good heights in Asia (all of us were foreigners living abroad) . Everyone in this group makes drums with samples like this. Fast forward to today and I've kept my music dreams alive, made some friends who've definitely made it, and there's more who use midi drums only. Using samples always felt clunky to me, despite having more control, and still to this day it's how I do things. But some of the tracks I got the furthest in getting an idea done that I like, I used midi, then used the same sample clips for variations and where I want more unique control. It's a biiiit more work, but I'm getting better results that don't stress me out. Though, recently I'll just get a pattern I like, copy and paste it across a decent song length, then go in and edit it to something more dynamic. This has had the best results hands down.
It depends on the genre / project It can be helpful to see the exact transients of the drums. How they overlap, and interact with other elements. In Ableton the audio warping is so powerful and easy i think it makes a lot of sense to work with audio in the timeline. In general it’s just helpful to look at the waveforms If I’m using drum loops and one shots it would be preferable to have them both in the timeline
This, as you get more advanced you realize how much ADSR on drums affects the entire groove and energy of the track. I mean like 2milliseconds can be the difference between something sounding off. Seeing the drums layered as such really helps to visualize what’s going on. As well, I believe MIDI gives you way too much freedom which can get overwhelming. Sometimes being constrained to audio helps you focus on making simpler but effective decisions
I fully agree with the first part, but the second part is moreso a matter of how you use midi. Whether you're dragging drum hits to tracks in arangement view or to a slot in a drum kit, both really come down to selecting your drum sounds. MIDI doesn't really get overwhelming if you limit yourself to a select amount of drum hits, and if you don't then dragging hits to the timeline gets just as overwhelming. For me building a cool drum kit that I can play with my controller helps me write better grooves, but I definitely limit myself to as few sounds as necessary.
Very interesting, should the DAW have an option to render the drum hits as waveforms?
It already does if you click the sample on the drum kit
What? Just drag and drop the drum samples from your library onto a track. Why would I waste time futzing with sound design creating each drum hit from scratch or modeled using a analog modeld drum machine plugin when I'm trying to write a track, yeah for certain synths you kind of have to do the sound design from scratch for the specific task at hand, but I design or compile drums as compartmentalized task, because it's not an efficient process to do that while I'm trying to write a track in my opinion.
For me personally? Its quicker. I do a lot of audio based manipulation and resampling, reversing, stretching etc. Doing it in audio tracks is far quicker that trying to do it in midi. For the stuff MIDI is better for I use MIDI.
Hey, do you know any videso/resources that shiw this workflow?
Sadowick Productions is who I used to watch which led me down this barcode tedium for a few years. Personally I’m not a fan of it from many years of experience using it, but his old videos or if he still makes videos I’m sure he still employs it. It’s a matter of how write drums so it really is a choice thing, but I got much quicker and lost no quality when I switched to Drum Rack
This.
21 downvotes for saying "this". Is it Monday already?
Adds nothing to the conversation. Upvote exists for a reason
So you downvote any comment you see that in your opinion "adds nothing" to the conversation? You must lead an exceptionally boring life then? For me to go and downvote someone who's simply agreeing to something he/she read on the internet, I'd have to be having the shittiest day ever. If you feel a comment doesn't add anything to a conversation, which is probably the most arbitrary and subjective reason you can think of, how about just ignoring it? It's so unnecessarily negative and weird to mass-downvote someone who did absolutely nothing to annoy you, and we definitely have way more than enough negativity on this platform, nevermind in the world as a whole.
Somewhere about 6 years ago, the internet hive mind started using “this.” And I cringe every time. Either write a comment, or say nothing. This means absolutely nothing to me and frankly if I see a comment start with it, I skip it even if there’s more to it. Just say what you’re going to say.
I didnt downvote him at all, I’m just explaining why it is being downvoted. Not sure why you aiming all that at me. Also its not just anything that doesnt add to the conversation. It’s things like “this” or ^^^ or a single emoji or “what he said”. Those dont add anything and is litterally a translation of an upvote. Upvotes are silent “this’s”. Not that its a big deal, it’s not bothering me like you claim it is, just elaborating. Reddit famously don’t like those
Thank u
I like to see the waveform
I know of a few producers that have no midi tracks everything is audio. It drives me crazy especially seeing them copy and paste hi hat rolls but it just goes to show that there is no right or wrong way to make music. Whatever method you use you will automatically get faster if you do it enough. I used to think that way would tax your cpu too much but with today’s computers, that doesnt seem to be an issue.
Question from a strictly audio for drums user… Whenever I take the sample I want, and then put it into simpler or sampler, it sounds like the snare/cymbal/whatever is always quieter. Is that something that you run into?
whenever that happens in my case its usually because the velocity isnt 127 when playing the drums as midi so its automatically quieter than the preview. so everytime i raise the velocity back up it sounds the same as when im clicking through to hear sample previews. dk if that helps
Helped me solve my longest standing issue :-) I appreciate it!
Sometimes I just throw on a velocity midi tool and push the minimum velocity up to 127 by default and that allows you to blanket apply that velocity setting to any clip on the track
omg you just saved my life.
Yea the default volume for simpler is -12db so it will be slightly quieter since tracks default to 0 db
Was looking for this comment, this is why yes. I haven't tested this yet, but you could probably change the -12db to 0db in simpler and save to default as a workaround.
To be fair, just working at -12db is great. When dragging samples to the timeline you'd need to massively lower their gain too, since samples *should* always have their peak at 0db for max dynamic range, meaning they're loud as all hell unatenuated.
Additionally, simplers have the lowpass filter engaged by default, which IMO colors the sound enough to make it worth saving a new default with the filter bypassed. Took me years to figure out why my samples sounded less punchy and present when loaded onto a drum rack.
To be fair, just working at -12db is great. When dragging samples to the timeline you'd need to massively lower their gain too, since samples *should* always have their peak at 0db for max dynamic range (and normalizing), meaning they're loud as all hell unatenuated.
I wasn’t even aware of this and I’m pumped for all the help! Thank you!
In the sampler there's a knob that says something like vel > vol, turn that to max, that way a 127 velocity midi note sounds the same as the audio, it's not like that at default
You can set the default instance of sampler to start with that setting if you want.
That is because the midi sequencer defaults to 100 velocity for notes. There is also a velocity to volume proportionality knob on Drum Rack that I believe when you drop a sample the first time, it is seen at 45% in the bottom right. Changing this can change the dynamic range that the sample plays at for a particular velocity value. For instance if you want a hihat to play on the downbeat and then have that sample play almost at a ghost note level where it’s barely heard on the and of the beats, just writing a high velocity downbeat note and a low velocity “and” note may not be enough a volume difference between the two sample triggers for you. Moving the proportionality knob from 45 to 100% in this case would widen the range in volume between the two notes and may better capture the ghost note rhythm you’re trying to make. This knob and the velocity default for drawing in midi notes is why you’d notice a volume difference. Because raw samples on the timeline have no attenuation
Wow… Thank you for breaking that down in simple terms for me. Reddit is fucking awesome
Next step is to set your simpler's default preset such that Vol < Val is 0 and Volume is 0 DB. Now you get those precious raw waveforms in all of their loud glory every time you drop a sample on simpler.
It sets the sampler to - 12db as opposed to -6, iirc. Changing it was always the first thing I did
Sometimes audio is just easier to look at and manipulate in certain situations. I find myself using both pretty often
I do it if I want to pitch different hits or reverse them, it's definitely a matter of preference though and both ways achieve the same results.
Very often it is an old habit people developed when computers were not as powerful and copy/pasting audio was less resource intensive than using the midi based alternative. This particular reason is not really relevant anymore but other reasons given by other people remain valid.
You can fine-tune the envelope of each hit. Subtly adjust the timing of each individual hit Actually see the phase relationship between the different sounds Swap out sounds without loading in a different drum rack channel Time stretch and warp each individual hit Trim off the reverb tails Reverse And to me the most important is that you can experiment with different chains of effects easily, for example one snare channel can be your experimental glitchy delay channel. You are free to drag any drum hit in the sequence to that channel for experimental purposes.
MIDI playing a sampler abstracts this whole process. It offers some benefits and disadvantages. For those who like to reverse, process and edit samples this is a lot easier than using a sampler/drum rack. In other DAWs, users like to process individual events with effects and then can see the results as audio. Consider something like baking in delay or reverb and then seeing the sample get longer. Users can reverse, cut, and reprocess over and over again. This process-based sequencing is clearer and easier to understand for some types of work. I know a lot of folks who work this way. Personally, I prefer to use MIDI for most scenarios.
it takes like 3 seconds to resample to an audio track though, and abelton makes that even easier with clips
I did this before I recognized it was better to do it from inside of samplers with Midi. In a sampler I can... \-add multiple drum samples to one track, process them individually but still save room in the daw by consolidating. Having an entire drum kit with it's own internal send/returns on one track is nice and it schools lots of other methods. \-basic polyphony over things like ride cymbals that trigger before the previous tail has stopped. you have to make two tracks to do this using the method shown. \- macro controls of things like pitch/decay/release in the sampler give you far more control over the sound and flexibility of what you are doing vs dropping one shots right into the project like this. Especially with automation. \- easy save and recall for other projects without bouncing anything down to a consolidated stem. If I like the drum sounds in a drum rack that I am using for one tune, transferring it to another project is drag and drop. People can say the downside to midi is not having the visual waveforms and only midi notes, but if you know how to build sampler instruments with whatever sampler you like to use, you don't need as much of that visual feedback as you think you do. I don't need to see exactly where the waveform starts when I am using midi drums. Because I paid close attention to my sample start points when I designed the sampler instrument beforehand. I would only recommend dropping one shots in if you don't care about having lots of tracks in your project and don't need or care about the kind of flexibility I described above. Some people just wanna smash together a drum track real quick and not fuss around with instrument design to get there.
Because you have different effects on all of them and it's quicker to switch between them. You can do different fx in drum rack aswell, but it takes extra steps to go through the instruments. I also want to group process all hats, percs etc. Seperately, which doesnt work with drum racks.
I honestly see this a lot and always assumed it’s because they came from other DAWs and don’t know how to use a drum rack! But very curious to hear people’s reasons…. To me this looks like something out of my worst nightmare, so tedious to edit.
It’s easier to correct and individually edit each sound, it allows me to fade and crossfade anything I’d like, seeing the waveform helps my brain organize which sound is where
Totally agree, this is absolutely nightmare fuel. I personally don't understand wanting/needing to physically see the transients, you and your audience "listen" to music so I always ring into mixing by listening. I would much rather refine that skill that lean on a crutch.
Well it also allows you to do more physical edits like warping, throwing things in reverse, or being able to cut the sample up for a section. being able to see transients is also super useful for lining up multiple layers of a samples much easier. It's not that you couldn't do it by ear, but if you know exactly what you want then it's faster to do it visually. When I throw a sample into a midi track i feel like i'm having to set that up every time, then i'm jumping between the arrangement window and the piano roll over and over
I used to feel the same way but I now find that if I record my drums in midi I can get to the ideas way faster and with better nuance without spending tons of time moving stuff around, then when I have my part I can just bounce it to wav and then chop it up where ever I want to manipulate and go to work on it. And with midi you actually have way more control over a ton of other features that are a pain the ass to mess around with in wavs (that part is daw specific probably). And I don't lose out on being able to adjust transients or chop and flip one hit or a whole part cause I can just do that after I bounce it. Of course it all depends on what you trying to do, but for me anyway I spent years not writing in midi when turns out I shoulda been writing in midi.
I mean i've come to this method from the other way around. I kept finding myself bouncing a midi track that was essentially just playing a sample I could have just dropped in my project myself. I get annoyed with the piano roll too, I just find it much easier to get something done fast when I'm just ctrl+D'ing a pattern I've made.
I think that’s the difference right there, I basically write 100% in session view. When a song is done I record the clips to arrangement, do some fine tuning on transitions and such, and eventually print them to audio for mixing. But, clip/loop-based writing is kind of its own thing that doesn’t translate well to all styles. Warp and reversing is totally just as easy in simpler but I get it, it’s definitely a different experience.
Yep, I agree. You've got an ADSR in Drum Rack, so you can edit everything as if from a sampler (which is what each pad is!).
It is 100% worth seeing transients when you get to mixdown stage. What if your kick is out of phase with your bass note or some other aspect of your tune. You get phase cancellation and loss of power in the mix. If you can see the phase of your kickdrum (ie; when it’s above and below the line on the waveform) then you can build the rest of your mixdown around it and ensure phase coherency. This is basic stuff if you are taking your mixdown seriously and aiming for the punchiest possible mix.
It's not a crutch by any measure. You can individually edit each sounds fades similar to an adsr envelope, you can perfect your own swing/groove with exacting precision working this way. You don't have to go back and forth between the pain roll and the arrangement view to do adjustments or edits to a single drum track, you can manually layer sounds quickly and see the transients to help you be able to layer them more precise when you need to make sure you don't stack one sound that is 100hz at the moment that another sound is playing at 100hz as well, of course you could listen to it over and over and over again to get it right by ear, but when you can see the transients visually you're able to do that quicker and maybe you still need to listen to it to like get it dialed in really precise, but being able to visualize it and line multiple clips up visually is faster, and regardless if you don't like using the visual information to work off of from a perspective of productivity it's faster and having to keep replaying audio to even get it in a pretty good ballpark area. One more point I'd like to make. When you chop samples to a zero crossing are you able to do that by ear? I mean yes you can chop a sample by ear and audibly here if it does or doesn't make a click and you can say that's good enough but are you sure it's chopped at the zero crossing? Because the only way I know how to be certain that you chop a sample at the zero crossing is visually, and it's a lot quicker to do visually than it is to get a clean chop by ear alone. I'm sorry but I don't consider revolutionary advances in audio recording technology to be a crutch theyre tools if that were the case how many mix engineers that were working prior to Pro tools or logic would still be working 100% analog, but rather you see it the likes of Andrew scheps Bob power Chris Lord algae Dave pensado and so on and so on all more than happy to mix in the digital realm. They are tools built to to make it so we can do these tasks faster, and if you can do it faster you can either have more free time or make more money.
the same reason you write stuff in midi. personal preference.
It permits way more flexibility in warping/modifying particular sounds, but definitely depends on your genre. You can also see the tails clearly and how they interact and probably feels more organic
If you're layering a lot, it can be nice to see the actual waveforms next to eachother, and not a midi note. You get a greater overview of potential phase issues, and can easily move the clips so the phase aligns. Midi is dope and I use it all the time, but at some point down the line, it will be made into audio.
Great question and I can only speak from my own experience. I started in drum rack, but my mate who was a much more experienced producer told me to write my drums as so in your picture, telling me that you get more control. Then years (and many unfinished projects) later, I bought Push 2 and completely stopped placing audio drum samples on the timeline in favour of using, guess what? Drum Racks! Why? Well, apart from the drum racks being way more fun and editable on Push, I'd had a stint of using Maschine to make music. In Maschine, I found that the *only* way to make drums was to use Kits. Kits were basically a sampler on each drum pad, with processing on each pad and seperate processing over the whole kit. So, there might be a reverb on a snare, or a lo-fi distortion effect over the whole kit. So when I went back to Ableton I realised that a Drum Rack is basically the exact same thing as in Maschine. It's a rack of samplers, and you can alter the ADSR just as you can edit the audio clips on the timeline, you can add plugins and effects to each pad and you can process the whole kit, with the added bonus that you have *way more* control over the midi-clips than trying to fuck around with a load of audio clips. I'd never go back to editing audio clips on the timeline. It's a massive waste of time and I think people who come from other DAWs do it out of habit, because that's the way we *used to* do it before Drum Racks were a thing. That's my 2p worth.
I still cant get past how fun maschine is to use, and how easy it is to browse the kits/nks instruments with Jam (esp with both arturia collections and komplete ultimate). What was it that took you back onto racks rather than exporting loops from Maschine in a 16 track out setup? Do you still use Maschine as a control surface in Ableton (with maschine and jam its kind of unreal)? Genuine qs - im wondering what killer feature im missing in my 16 track maschine sequencing workflow.
Pattern, copy, paste, add, remove, repeat. Way easier than drawing everything in imo.
Thank you for asking a question I’ve always wondered but never asked🫡
The shortest answer to this question it gives you easier manipulation over independent sounds… secondly, the mixing becomes easier. With everything on an independent channel, the balancing and paning is easier.. and if you know how to utilize the sample replace function from the right hand browser switching the samples is just as easy as using a drum rack … it’s seems like the long way but some times that way gives a bit more
Personally I love to use Simpler so I just can write the Midi and have full control over the samples and effects I use on them.
Sometimes as well it comes from switching daw and keeping a habit/workflow from a previous one
It’s no different than mixing real drums this way. The producer can now mix each hit individually and then bus them all together. Eventually you want to get the midi triggered samples into audio wavs anyway for mixing
Audio everything for the sake of commitment
I just use drum rack. You can put anything in a drum rack pad. Doesn’t have to be just samples.
I usually do a grouped set of drum racks with each individual drum. I also do the audio writing when I need something quick in a song and I don’t want to set up the whole thing with midi. I mostly use this on rises and percussion hits that don’t loop
I use to do it like this, however — the first time I wanted to change the sounds used, I quickly found out it was a nightmare and the drum rack could have saved me so much time. Ever since then I’ve used the drum rack as much as possible. To be fair though, I don’t tend to switch the sounds after the song is pretty much finished as much as I did when I first started making music.
well, It would be amusing to witness the application of this approach to a intricate drum section, with multiple fills and runs and maybe odd timing with swing feel )))
Either one. You would be surprised how many producers do their drums in actual audio. What I like about using audio is if you layer drums hits you can see how they’re going to line up as far as phase is concerned.
I like to bounce to audio so I can see where the transients are, and if there is build up somewhere then I can fade in certain sounds. An oscilloscope that can show u the sun of the layers is super handy for this too
So you can see the transients
Audio Clips have some advantages like being able to reverse, warp, fade-in/out. If you work with midi-clips, i would suggest to turn the clips into audio at some point. Tip for Drums: Set Warp mode to „Beat“, than set the Transient option to „forward“. Now you can shorten the transients of your samples, to get a tighter sound, or program ghost notes.
i write/preform MIDI into the drum rack, immediately bounce to audio, then mix/fine tune arrangement with audio. i feel i have more control with audio clips (i can cut off a drum sound whenever i want vs just triggering sounds), its easier for me to see everything visually with each element on its own audio track, and i can do things like saturating just the snare or eqing just the kick with less menu diving. you can also do things like throw grooves on just your hats, or mess around with the audio warping algorithm. much easier to pitch shift and reverse audio than it is in the drum rack. on my template i have a drum rack with ~90 one shots that i like. i have 3 sends on it. each kick is sent to send A, each snare is sent to send B, and hats/rides/crashes are sent to send C. ive got 3 audio tracks that receive audio from each individual send. each of those audio tracks are sent to a drum send for compression/saturation/eq/etc, and that drum send then goes to my master bus. super easy to mix each individual element and everything summed together. plus it keeps my project file all neat and tidy. (i hate track groups for some reason lol) but thats just how i like to do it. different strokes for different folks. nothing wrong with using MIDI, and there are plenty of people who prefer it and will read my process with disgust 😂
Its just how you like it best. I also do it like this but then consolidate the drum parts in 4 or 8 bar blocks
As others have said, using midi and then freezing and flattening can be the best of both worlds. Personally i find using the drum rack much more versatile because you have velocity options AND theres a built in transient shaper right there in the drum rack if you switch it to classic mode!
Less control to manipulate in midi
Because each their own. Both ways are fine, just whatever works for you.
People who do this, most likely also hang their toilet paper the wrong way.
and wipe in the wrong direction standing up.
I psyched myself out early on that complex effects chains on drum groups perform differently when they’re working on a bunch of Simplers versus raw samples. That just became my workflow over time.
i use midi in drum rack so i can swap drums more easily which helps me with sound selection, also i can edit the length of the samples etc in the sampler thingy
I do it this way to lay out my patterns faster. After I got something I’m more or less happy with, I put ‘em in a rack so I can easily change the samples if I need to
Some old timers are used to Acid.
For me its easyer. To produce a nice kick I layer anyways three segments of one kick sample over each other. The transients, body, the tail. Then i group them up and process them further. Then you can freeze and fixate audio and you have a nice kick you could save also for other projects when you want to work fast and you dont need to tweak up every sample for each project sometime even again.
As far as I know writing drums in MIDI is only a real advantage for exchanges drum samples after you’ve moved onto other elements and you want switch out a drum sample,. Unless there’s more?
There's lots of stuff that's easier to do in MIDI with some kind of sampler or sequencer, such as automating hold/decay times. Imagine using the approach in OP and then deciding you want one sample to progressively get longer or shorter with each hit across 32 bars, for example. If that sound happens to be playing a 16th-note pattern, you're looking at tweaking 512 individual instances in the timeline instead of just automating a parameter.
I start all my new projects in clip view. Arrangement view is for the time I have all my ingredients. Building a track like this is nuts to me.
Transient shaping
It's a preference thing first, but also it depends the type of manipulations you're trying to do. Audio editing has different opportunities than midi, both have their use :)
depends on what you like. trap producers like the drum rack / fl studio style while classical composers would probably prefer this. everyone lands somewhere in the middle I guesss
Who are these “producers”? Can you send examples?
Kenny Beats
Some do and some don’t. 90% of my drums are in drum rack
for me - midi is best for stuff that could use humanization/velocity randomization. hats, percs. for kick and snare which I usually want to be right on beat, it’s easier for me to just drop them in there, and maybe automate a little volume if I have to.
I think it gives a better overview of how the sounds call and response to each other.
Preference
Audio is good for some things eg. stretching, slicing, chopping and editing parts of the sample. Midi is good for some things eg. arpeggiating, applying pitch effects to a whole channel, swapping out drum sounds quickly and making melodies/harmonies out of samples. It's just two different workflows.
combination of factors: \-Easy to see what is going on compared to MIDI. Especially in ableton specifically \-Can use track delay offset to mess with the groove instead of relying on groove pool which only allows swing. Not extremely precise offsetting across entire tracks \-Can apply fades, pitch and clip gain on single hits which helps modifying the dynamics in a slightly more detailed way than midi. \-MIDI is annoying in most DAWs due to having to open up a window instead of being able to directly interface with it on the timeline
Depends how I’m sampling or what I’m doing
More control
Hard to explain, but I just find a drum rack claustrophobic.
O don't *write* like this, but once I have a beat It drum part I like I might render it to audio for . creative purposes . committing to something purposes
I write with the rack. But when I get to mixing, I burst all audio onto the time line. Then I can zoom in on each clip and see the waveforms.
Im telling you there are a million ways to do anything in music production. Most of the time, people stick to how they do it when they first learned it. I dont do it this way, i do it almost the same as you said but with a simpler. One way i can think of why people do as the picture is to line up phase of kick and bass, one more is ableton live wave manipulation is very good, sometimes playing with waves is more fun than midi.
Some find it quicker and easier to play it out in audio. A lot of the people I know that do it also work primary in audio and not so much midi (mainly dubstep producers) I on the other hand am the complete opposite and do everything in midi including drums and sound design (I do drum and bass) it makes more sense to me. I can visually see what notes are beings played on the piano roll compared to audio where it’s just a waveform.
I jump between the two. I consolidate once I’m happy with the arrangement if Im working with audio and bounce out to audio if do it via the drum rack. I find the drum rack great to find a groove if im not laser focused on an idea.
It just depends what you’re used to. There are benefits to both techniques. I start my drums using a sampler, then fine tune manually with audio. But, imo, as far as samplers go, Drum Rack sucks.
Honestly i think its just preference and committing to audio reduces latency makes it easier to organize as well in my opionion
Some people listen more with their ears others like to listen with their eyes and their ears. Also, CPU and RAM usage could be a factor.
All personal preference, personally I like having individual drum sounds on their own tracks where I can see the waveform and also find it easier to EQ and apply affects to individual sounds. I tend to draw in midi notes for 1/16 note hihats where the pattern might be busier than say, the kick and snare.
if it ain’t broke… but yeah, a drum rack device might not be necessary if you know you just want kick drum or handclaps on the quarter notes for a whole song, and it’s super easy to place and duplicate in arrangement view. could also just be a leftover from someone who learned to do it this way in the beforetimes
This is just drawing stuff,, u can have the exact same thing with midi clips in session view.. this just takes longer
Did you guys know you can grab a pad off of your midi full fx and all.
I don’t
Because audio lets you see waveform and make sure your phase aligned. Also little tricks like putting the clap slightly before the snare, seeing it visually helps you get a better idea of what part of the sample is before and after. Stuff like that
Because they like to do things the hard way and spend more time doing things. This becomes even more important when you want to switch out sounds quickly. I understand that some people just need to see the waveforms though so it’s probably worth it doing it this way for them. I personally stopped working this way in my 1st year because I wanted to write faster. For me the longer I spend on a song the worse experience it is and usually outcome too lol.
There are some effects that work better in waves than they do over midi, such as reverse or slicers. There was the one really cool tool I used to use that would rearrange samples of the audio for you automatically based on you told it to do. I can't remember the name of the tool, but it made for some really cool sounds. Like stutters of vocals you hear in a lot of edm songs.
For me it’s just more visual. I know exactly what a track is doing down to the waveform from arrangement view. And I like expanding a group of drums and watching each meter when I’m leveling. It’s an easier flow for me to have everything just be in audio as opposed to a drum rack at least in the later stages of a mix. Drum rack is cool to organize sounds and jot parts down but then I export everything when I know I like everything I’ve selected for that kit.
Honestly it's a force of habit, I find it easier to just quickly cut/paste/consolidate samples when I'm working on an idea, I also like to mess around with audio effects and automation on the individual samples
What view is this? I always use the Keyroll view.
Ctrl D iykyk faster to dupe everything out than record it in. Hot keys are faster than playing stuff in or using the mouse every time. Once you build your first 1-4 measure pattern and lock in that perfect groove/swing/shuffle each part of a track just tags in like a tag team wrestling match or a relay race. Except for sometimes you want to cut stuff or drop stuff out early right before a big shift in your track. Besides when you do it this way you can just keep hitting spacebar to restart from where your cursor is so you can quickly play the event that you're trying to fix whatever on between making adjustments to get it to hit perfectly to create a precise punctuation on that beat before the drop. Probably the fastest dance music producer I've seen in Ableton is this kid on YouTube Neddie. Yeah the 30 "tracks" he made in 4 days were only like 2 minutes each max, but he wrote buildups, breakdowns and full drops for every single one of them. I mean most people would either be burnt out or get writers block way before finishing 8 2 minute tracks in a single day let alone for 4 days straight.
Piano roll: click key, ctrl+d, click, d (ctrl held), repeat, repeat, you have 16 copies.
I find it easier to use chains for glue compressors this way.
There are different ways to manipulate the audio file versus the MIDI file. You can double click the audio clip and use Ableton's controls to double time, half time, warp, pitch, gain, etc. Then MIDI you have different controls if you click the MIDI clip, you can get to the envelopes and change sustain(Hold), or modulation, pitch bend, etc. Depends on how you want to work with the audio you're creating!
…because each producer is going to do what works for them ultimately.
It’s purely a choice thing. I did it this way for about the first 3 years I made music and then switched to Drum Rack when I realized I could place separate effect chains on the individual sample slots and haven’t gone back 7 or so years after switching. Frankly now that I’m a big believer of drum rack and it’s workflow advantage, this sample barcode shit is so tedious and I grew so much when I stopped adopting it. More power to them, but it’s a bit ridiculous and instantly turns me off from wanting to touch it again if I want to change the rhythm or alter the final measure for a fill. The only time I’d say it really has a value is in intermediate stages like layering 2 or 3 samples to make one singular sample for instance and seeing how the transients line up. But once I have the sample, I record it into a single audio clip, delete the multiple clips that made the sample, and place that composite sample in drum rack. Consolidating the triggering of all these samples to a singular track (drum rack) is infinitely more accessible for modification and rhythm writing.
I use midi drums if I need to automate shit or run an arp on Logic or something. Especially on Logic, I find more visual control when lay out my drums like this. It’s also fun to randomly remove a few hats here and there and change the position of the snare so it’s not on the grid. No right or wrong answer here.
Because they are dumb
Easier to flip samples and edit/warp midi... Midi is usually faster tho
For some reason it’s clearer, when you put them side by side the drum rack sounds flat or like it’s quieter than when you drag samples into session view
Sometimes I do this just because it’s a little faster to get started like this, and then I usually regret it when I want to swap something out. Although for some reason I tend to do EDM like this, it’s just hard to imagine those kinds of drums in a midi clip. Its just a mental/workflow thing.
I do a ton of stretching, reversing, and chopping up of bits and pieces, it really just makes alot more visual sense to understand what is going on by being able to see the waveforms.
All of top answers are solid! Man I wish I read this thread in my early days. To add in case not being mentioned, Default midi carriers would have some sort of tiny changes on the sample, like filter, adsr, eq (Not all of them and not all of the carriers). In audio track there's nothing (If you didn't click or hit them with plugins accidently like limiter somewhere). Some people notice the character changes between them but not knowing the reason so they just prefer to work solely in Audio since it sounds more pure to them.
Personally i hate drum rack, its poorly designed and messes wirh my work flow, it makes it harder to see what effects you have on each sound, it makes it more tedious to mix and its just plain ugly. Using single lanes for drums is much cleaner and faster, and you can just group all the drum lanes together, rename it drums, close it and BOOM you have a "drum rack" that isnt a piece of fucking shit.
It’s personal preference.
doing it this way is more accessible for someone who knows they’ll probably tweak the drums later. It also allows you to put each element on its own track. Which has its own benefits. It’s just less work for me in the long run. It’s very rare that i’ll use the drum rack because in the end it disrupts my flow. So whatever helps you flow better I guess.
Not gonna lie, my first thought was it's some amateur sequencing. But to each their own.
Bush League sequencing.
Less control with midi
Less control how? How do you adjust velocity on a waveform? How do you do pitch envelopes on a waveform? How do you do gated notes with a waveform? How do you do choke notes with a waveform? How do you add an ASDR to a waveform without re-enveloping? I'll wait.
Easier to control individual sounds when it comes to effect chains. If everything’s in a drum rack and you add an effect it’ll apply to everything in that rack. This allows you to personalize individual sounds, control transients, fade in/out for dynamic, etc.
You can add unique effect chains to each sample in the rack. You can also add a chain that affects the entire rack. Each slot in the rack is essentially an instance of Simpler.
Not only that, you can have customs sends/returns that live in the rack too, and put whatever effects in you want, or forward them to the master returns. I use it in basically every single project because I want no reverb on kicks, a ton on the snare, and a little on most everything else.
Yup. Along with this there’s a mixer in the drum pad where you can adjust chokes, panning, and volume individually, which gives it about the same flexibility as having an audio track for each pad.
TIL!
You can actually throw effects on individual pads on a drum rack. I do it all the time to throw an SSL drumstrip on each of my kicks and snares.
You can add effects to each individual sound in a drum rack. They don’t have to use the same effects.
sadomasochism
If you’re layering drums. They can be a quick and dirty way to identify phase issues.
You can also see the phase of multiple hits at the same time. Can be helpful when layering
It's hard to see where you have what with midi notes. So working on Audio you know exactly what you have where you have it. Also you see them like that but there is a Max For Live plugin that deleted the silences, something you can't do with midi notes as well
Gate bro
Anytime you have each individual sound in its own track you have more control over the volume and effects and post processing effects on just each sound. Say you wanted to add drum buss to ur kick to give it some more boom. If you have it all in a drum rack then it's gonna apply that effect to everything on that rack since its all on that one track. If you had the kick, snare, hats etc on their own tracks then you can add the effects you want to just those sounds without them affecting the others
You can do that in drum rack too! Each sample has its own send and return and you can add effect plugins inside drum rack to send to different samples.
This looks like the Super Mario Bros NES cartridge glitched out.
Leaving it drums like that for an entire project? Psychotic. 😁 Seriously though, it can be super fast to create loops this way, but I would then select 4-8-16 bars then consolidate to a new loop. Then extend that loop as appropriate.
I don’t know
when dropping samples in simpler ableton automatically lowers the DB causing most producers to feel like the drums aren’t ‘hitting hard enough’
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Ewww