Creating a Live Set in Ableton Live

# 2 How to layer external hardware sounds with internal samples in Ableton Live’s Drum Rack

In this blog series we’ll be exploring MMS Tutor Tom Lonsborough’s live setup, and how you might look to create your own.

Tom Lonsborough is school of electronic music’s resident Ableton Live Certified Tutor, course leader for our Ableton Live Weekender Course and our longer industry music production courses, along with being general mixdown boffin!

In Tom’s other life, he’s in a successful 3-piece chuggy-disco electronic band called 2 Billion Beats, who have has a slew of over 25 releases and have toured globally. At the heart of their setup is Ableton Live, sequencing a boatload of hardware.

Recently Tom spent some time at Sonic State HQ talking through how 2 Billion Beats perform live. We’ll be looking more closely at the specifics of his setup, and answer some of the questions raised in the video series. If you have any questions that may come up relating to this blog series, feel free to get in touch.

Let’s talk gear

Tom says: “The Vermona DRM-1 drum machine was an upgrade from the MFB-522, mainly because it’s rack mountable!

As all the drum sequencing is done within Live for our live shows, the MFB’s sequencer was redundant: the DRM-1 doesn’t have one so aside from being rack mountable, this made it a good choice to keep things simple.

The DRM-1’s scope of sounds is broader than the MFB, with more tweakable parameters. With this said, the MFB’s kick was super fat…

Finally, as well as having an awesome sound palette, the connections on the front of the DRM can act as either insert points – handy if you have a stomp box you want to strap across one of the sounds, or they can act as individual outputs.

This is really important for balancing and processing sounds in a live environment: the key use for us is being able to separate the kick drum synth from the other outputs.

The kick can be balanced and processed differently, we can also then use it as a side chain input for compressors strapped across other elements such as the bass to get a really tight live mix, almost as if we’re in the studio.

In the video, I mention about layering the raw output from the DRM with samples inside Live to fill any holes in the raw sounds. For example, the snare on the DRM can tend to lack a certain amount of 200Hz thump – a hole which we plug by layering it with something more ‘acoustic’ like, in our case the snare from a Roland 707 machine.

What we get as a result is raw power and analog warmth from the DRM, then more mid range from the 707 samples giving a very full sound. This might seem over the top to some, but we think the resulting sound warrants the fine adjustments before going out to play live.”

Below are instructions on how to execute this yourself – key here is to know your hardware i.e. which MIDI note triggers which sound on your instrument.

On the Vermona DRM in question, according to the manual ‘SNARE’ is midi note 40, which is E1. You can work out what MIDI note 40 is by referring to the MIDI note editor window within Ableton live (remember, an octave is 12 notes).
In an ableton drum rack you can allow more than one slot to be triggered by the same MIDI note. Create an ableton drum rack, and within this drum rack load up an external instrument device onto the relevant midi note which triggers the Vermona snare – in this case, E1.
Then, within this external instrument device, you would set the ‘MIDI to’ to the Vermona – in Tom’s case this would be listed as Motu Microlite 1 which is the connection on the MIDI interface that the Vermona is connected to.
On an adjacent slot within the ableton drum rack, load up a 707 snare sample and click the chainlist button on the left hand side of the drum rack (middle button of the top 3).
Then, press the ‘I-O’ button (the top button of the bottom 3 on the left hand side of the drum rack), and under the ‘Receive’ column, set the sample slot of the 707 snare to receive the same note (in this case E1) as your external instrument.
Now, every time the Vermona receives E1, it will also play the 707 snare sample. You will see the E1 slot now says “multi”
The output from the 707 sample will be on the Drum Rack track itself
The output from the DRM (depending on your setup) will need routing back into Live
In Tom’s case the output from the DRM is connected up to channel 2 on his audio interface
Create a new audio track in Live, set it’s input to channel 2, and turn monitor to “In”
You should now hear the output of the DRM snare in Live when you trigger the E1 note on the Drum Rack

Here is a bespoke video on how to achieve this using a Roland TR-8 as an example:

Next up!

Or check out part one in the series

Next up we’ll look at how to create a white noise sweep in Drum Rack using an instance of Analog which can be triggered and modulated with a MIDI controller to add depth to your transitions between tracks.

Creating a Live Set in Ableton Live

# 2 How to layer external hardware sounds with internal samples in Ableton Live’s Drum Rack

In this blog series we’ll be exploring MMS Tutor Tom Lonsborough’s live setup, and how you might look to create your own.

Let’s talk gear

Below are instructions on how to execute this yourself – key here is to know your hardware i.e. which MIDI note triggers which sound on your instrument.

Here is a bespoke video on how to achieve this using a Roland TR-8 as an example:

Next up!

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