I'v been looking into Midi a bit lately and the possibilites of using external controllers and sequencers to control my 404SX. It seems it should be pretty easy to set up a drum rack in Live to control the SP. And if you have Push, you could just use the touch strip to swipe up and down to access all the different banks?

Anyone that has tried this?

Why Drum Rack? If only for additional layering.
I use just simple blank midi tracks to get velocity and record sequences with my MPD32. Also Ableton has External Midi instrument to comfortably handle your sampler hooked up to the audio input.

Well, I'm afraid I can't explain why since I've been picking up tips and ideas from so many sources now my head is a mess.

But it seems Drum Racks can be used for a lot of things. You can set up macros and stuff to control different parameters on a synth etc.

http://www.askaudiomag.com/articles/usi ... l-hardware

In the pic below. If you look at the thin checkered stripe at the left. The big square shows which 16 notes/pads are shown big and can be played. So, by dragging the box up and down I believe you could zoom in a new bank of sounds on the SP.

Yes of course u can use other banks. Midi Channel 2 is for banks A-E, and Channel 3 is for banks F-J. As I remember, but you can assign channel in SP and output channel in ableton.
You can Access all banks with a blank midi channel with no drum rack.
Macroses can hardly be useful here...maybe for some midieffects, like arpegiators, randomizers and other. But again It could be done without drum rack. Well maybe u could solo pads that u need to play for example to bounce particular samples one by one.
Good information, it is more oriented on using many hardware samplers at once. Using one sp is more straight forward I suppose.

Thanks, I'll be looking into it really soon. Ableton gets overwhelming really fast.

depending on the controller you don't really even need to set it up through a drum rack. changing the midi notes of the pads on say an mpd to correspond to the notes of the sp or sampler or drum machine, you can just use midi in/outs. then you can still make an effects rack of the audio coming in through your sp. That will bypass all of the confusion setting it up on ableton through drum racks. Another way to do it if you're really wanting to use ableton, is to set it up through a midi adapter (or from the controller itself if it has an output) by setting a track's midi in from the controller, and out to the controller that's being used or usb adapter. then make an audio track for the sp, and you're on your way.