Drum Racks and kits

Drum RackSimplerLive 12 · about 4 min

A beat is the fastest way to start a song. But before you program one, where do Live's drums actually come from?

From a Drum Rack: one device that holds a whole kit. Once you know how it's laid out, you can swap kits, replace single sounds and build your own — without touching the beat you've written.

The idea: pads and notes

A Drum Rack is a grid of pads. Each pad holds one sound and listens for one MIDI note. Play that note and the pad fires.

808 Core Kit in a Drum Rack. Each pad holds one sound — click its ▶ to hear it. The knobs are macros for the whole kit.

The pads run from the bottom-left upwards. Every pad has its own M (mute), ▶ (play) and S (solo) buttons, so you can audition or silence a sound without opening anything. The knobs on the left are macros — a few controls the kit's designer picked to shape the whole kit at once.

Load a kit

  1. Browser
  2. Drums
Drag a kit from Browser › Drums onto a MIDI track — its Drum Rack opens below. The filter rows above the list narrow it to one kind of sound.
  1. Create a MIDI track with CmdShiftT (CtrlShiftT on Windows).
  2. In the browser, click Drums. The list shows kits; the Place column tells you which pack each comes from.
  3. Drag a kit — try 808 Core Kit — onto the new track.
  4. Click a pad's ▶ button to hear it.

Why the layout matters

Live's kits share one layout for the core sounds. The bass drum sits on C1, the snare on D1, the closed hi-hat on F♯1 and the open hi-hat on A♯1.

MIDI Note Editor for a 909 Core Kit clip: lanes named Bass Drum, Rim Shot, Snare Drum, Hand Clap, Closed Hi Hat, Open Hi Hat and more, with kick, snare and hi-hat notes on their lanes
With a Drum Rack, each row of the note editor is named after its pad.

So a beat written for one kit plays on another. Here's one two-bar pattern — identical notes — on two different kits:

0:00 / 0:04

Same notes, same loudness — only the kit changes. Switch while it plays.

Swap a kit in place

You don't have to delete a kit to try another. Use Hot-Swap instead.

  1. Click the Hot-Swap button in the Drum Rack's title bar (the circular-arrows icon next to the save icon).
  2. The browser shows an orange Swapping Instrument bar. Click any kit in the list — it replaces the current one, and your clip keeps playing.
  3. Click the ✕ on the orange bar when you're done.
Hot-Swap: whatever you pick in the browser now replaces the current kit — same track, same clip.

Find sounds faster

Scrolling through hundreds of samples gets old quickly. Three browser tools narrow things down:

  • Filters and tags. The rows above the list filter by kind (Kick, Snare, Hihat…) and by character — Punchy, Snappy, Lofi & Vinyl and more. Click a few to combine them.
  • Similar sounds. Right-click a sample and choose the option to show similar files. The search field then shows that sample with a ≈ sign, and the list is sorted by how close each result sounds.
  • Collections. Give sounds you like a Collection colour, and they'll be one click away in the sidebar next time.
Live browser: tag filters for Character (Acoustic, Analog, Punchy, Snappy and more) and Devices above a Results list of snare samples sorted by similarity
Tags narrow the browser by character; similar-sound results are sorted by how close they are.

Drum Rack or Simpler?

Both play samples, but they're built for different jobs.

  • Simpler plays one sample across the keyboard — great for a melodic sample or a single hit you want to pitch.
  • Drum Rack holds many sounds, one per pad. When you drop a sample onto a pad, Live puts it on that pad in its own player, ready to tweak.

Build your own kit

Ready-made kits are a starting point. Your own kit is where your sound starts.

  1. From Browser › Drums, drag the plain Drum Rack (marked Built-in) onto a MIDI track. Its pads are empty.
  2. Click Kick in the filter row and drag a kick onto the bottom-left pad (C1).
  3. Do the same with a snare on D1 and a closed hi-hat on F♯1.
  4. Save the result: click the save icon in the Drum Rack's title bar. It appears under User Library in the browser.
An empty Drum Rack, then a kick on the bottom-left pad (C1). The pad takes the sample's name, and the sample gets its own player.

Summary

  • A Drum Rack is a grid of pads; each pad holds one sound and answers one MIDI note.
  • Live's kits share a layout (kick C1, snare D1, closed hat F♯1, open hat A♯1), so beats survive a kit swap.
  • Hot-Swap replaces a kit — or one pad — without stopping the music.
  • Filters, tags, similar sounds and Collections make sounds quick to find.
  • One sound: Simpler. A whole kit: Drum Rack.

Practice

Build a four-pad kit

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Start from an empty Drum Rack and build a kit with a kick, a snare, a closed hi-hat and an open hi-hat, each on its usual note. Then program one bar that uses all four.

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Your pads should be: kick on C1, snare on D1, closed hi-hat on F♯1, open hi-hat on A♯1 — check by hovering a pad, or by the lane names in the note editor.

A simple first bar: kick on beats 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4, closed hats on every eighth note, and an open hat on the last eighth. The most common snag is a sound on the wrong pad, so the clip's lanes don't line up with Live's kits.

Same beat, three kits

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Load any kit, write a two-bar beat, then use Hot-Swap to hear it on two other kits. Which kit fits the song you have in mind?

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Your clip should keep playing through every swap — that's the shared layout at work. If a sound goes silent after a swap, that kit doesn't use the same pad for it; move the notes, or try another kit.

Find a better snare

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Find a snare you like in the browser, show sounds similar to it, and try three of them on your kit's snare pad.

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Click the snare pad, turn on Hot-Swap on the pad's own device, then work through the similar results: each click replaces the pad's sound while your beat plays. Use the Packs location if you want to stay with Live's own sounds.

Progress is saved in this browser.

That's the newest lesson. While the next one is being written, revisit an earlier lesson or redo the practice above.

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