ive been faithful to fruityloops till i finally broke down and started reading the ableton manuals and realized that it probably would work perfect for how i work. im like a on the fly kinda guy, i get bored with beats real quick because i like to bang em out live, dont like to sequence em. many of times ive chopped samples layered drums and banged out a song on the 555 without ever recording it. i hate the technical side of things now. but ableton seems to keep the work going so i wanted to see who else is in the ableton family cause its a pretty cool program. and that session view is insane. what i dont get yet is the effects part of it all, but im still reading up. but does anyone know how i could use ableton like a sampler with the pads and all. like i think impulse does it but i havent gotten that far yet. i think i can chop up a sample and load it into impulse and get busy in the session view as audio or midi. is this possible?
wheres hurling when you need him.

drum racks are your friend!

lets say to start with you make an audio track, and a midi track with a drum rack instrument on it.

to start with you'll grab your source sample and drop it on the audio track.. do this while in arrange view so you can see the audio and highlight bits of it.

Highlight a bit of the audio track, drag and drop it onto an empty spot on the drum rack.. then you hit the key that triggers that pad.. bang bang!

double click on the pad will fold out the info for that pad - envelopes, pitch setting, LFOs, filters.. then if you wanna add an effect to just that pad, you drop it right in there after the 'simpler' instrument (the sample playing thing that holds your sample for that pad )

now the quickest way to get a beat goin is switch to session view..

double clicking on an empty clip slot will create a 1 bar loop clip... if you wanna change it, double click on the clip then set loop length to however many bars... now just click the play button for that clip, turn on metronome, turn overdub on ...and bang your beat out! then you can go in and edit / quantise / etc if you fucked up or wanna change it.

If you're confused about the effects its basically like this: each drum rack is like a 'container'

first in the container is each pad (each pad is another container in a way)
so its like a bunch of boxes inside boxes... If you want the effect to effect just one pad, you drop it into one of the pad boxes.. if you want an effect to effect the entire drum rack, you put it inside the drum rack's box, but not inside any of the pad's box.

so like:

[drum rack (pad 1 <pad 1 effect>) (pad 2 <pad 2 efect>) <drum rack effect> ]

Thanks alot, yo. It's all clear to me now. It's like if I can rock any software like the 555 then I'm cool. Like fruityloops has the fpc instrument just like the 16 pads of a 555 and an mpc. So now I gotta figure out how to use ableton like that. Hey can you map midi keys to a controller manually. Like midi learn. Cause my axiom 25 has 8 pads. Ableton has the shittiest manual but alot of YouTube vids and my Internet is down. I'll get busy with the drum rack but I'd really like to have multiple chops that I can bang like an mpc. Maybe that's what you were explaining and I just didn't get it.

ahhhhh. the drum rack, ok i get it. just watched a vid too and im on my way. thanks cartesia. i was thinking of something totally different now that i see it im like oh, i prolly didnt even need the vid.
nice!!!

i could never figure out how to program the pads on my old axiom

then a kid broke it while we were jamming

you cant change note for note what drum rack recieves but what you CAN do is make a drum machine out of session view
drop each individual sound to a new cell and track and midi map the play button on all of them to the note/pad you want.
set global quantize to none, then select all of the clips and change the launch settings to trigger and turn off loop.

then either record into the playlist or into an audio track to resample

if you need more clarification look up "launch settings" in the pdf