Listen to this drum loop I downloaded from Splice.com
now listen to the drum loop again. I re-pitched the individual drum hits
separately to match this song.
I love downloading drum loops from places like Splice.com or
Loopmasters. It's a quick way to get a beat going
get inspiration to go with some chord ideas.
But sometimes I want to use the same groove
but modify the individual drum hits and retune them. Well in this video I'll
show you how and a couple cool tricks for using
inspiration from samples in Ableton. First of all you
should tune your drums to your song I always do this and it
makes such a big difference. I'll show you how to do
it later in the video. But first let's see how we can easily extract the
groove the rhythm of the drum sample to use
other drum sounds. By the way if you're learning Ableton I
have a great tutorial for beginners you can watch that right here.
First of all I found this great sample I love the groove of it
but I want to be able to use other samples
instead with the same drum arrangement and rearrange a bit to my taste and
re-tune it as well. Here's the original sample
pretty good but then when I add my own instruments to it
it's not quite tuned right and I want to rearrange it a little bit
check it out with my other instruments.
Not quite where I want it to be. I want it to end up like this.
That sounds more crisp and nice to me but I love the groove of the original
drums so let's see what we can do. First, I
dragged the sample from Splice.com into Ableton right here. I want to show you a
little trick first right click this drum loop and choose convert drums
to new MIDI track. Check it out we're going to have the same groove
using a stock Ableton drum kit. Here it is. So remember
the original beat
and now it's converted it into MIDI and using an Ableton drum kit.
Pretty cool right? So already you can take any sample
and then extract the groove from it extract the individual instruments.
Ableton does a really good job at this. So there you go that's trick
number one! If you like tricks like these I have a whole video showing you some
awesome tricks in Ableton that will extract full
chords and melodies from samples and lots of other
useful things you can do in Ableton you can watch that video
here. Now what you can do with this is you can choose a different
drum kit
same groove a different kit. Now what if I like the drum sounds in the original
sample loop? I want to reuse those but kind of make
it my own I'll show you how to do that. All right back to the original sample!
First thing we're going to do is we're going to create MIDI track and we're
going to insert simpler on that MIDI track and now we're
going to drag the drum sample from Splice into simpler
in simpler you can actually play this on your keyboard I'm hitting a low C.
Simpler's great I love it but what we're gonna do is crop the sample
to one bar so I think that's about one bar
turn on loop down here and it'll keep looping while you hold down your key.
That's pretty good you don't have to get it exact here next what we're going to
do is click on slice down here in simpler
and we're going to turn down the sensitivity. If we slice it exactly the
way it is it's picking up all sorts of transients in the middle
and we don't need all of those so I'm going to slice it down just so
I'm getting the main drum hits. That's about right because I want those
high hats in there as well maybe a little bit higher. There we go
we're getting all the hi-hats now too next
right-click the slices in here and you're going to click
slice to new MIDI track. Don't pick slice to drum rack you want to choose slice to
new MIDI track. I'll show you what this is
going to do. All right now it's created a new track
here and let's listen to what this new track is playing.
Now look what it's done it's taken all the slices from simpler
and arranged them into a drum rack and you can see all the samples that it's
chopped up. There's the kick that's one of the high
hats and you can clean these up a bit because there's a little sound at the
end I'm going to clean this up next we have another kick
and there's the snare and guess what we have a full
drum rack from that original sample! Hey if you're liking this video hit the LIKE
button don't forget to SUBSCRIBE :) and watch my beat break series lots of
cool tips in those videos! Best of all we also have the groove in
MIDI form. It's playing the original slices. You can
hear that there are multiple kick drums there's one here
another one there we can actually move all these kick drums down
let's find the other ones there's another
another one there we go now we've got all the kick drums playing from slice
one.
And you might want to adjust the groove a little bit here I need this kick drum
a little to the left excellent so now we've got a new groove
playing a new drum beat playing from the original samples let's also move
the snares let's move these together and the rest are
this is the hi-hat back down that's a hi-hat alright so now we have all the
high hats together kicks together and the snares.
Now we can tune them individually. Check it out here's the kick drum
I can tune it by transposing it.
The best way to do this is by trusting your ear I find it easier to listen to
the melody or chords alone and then soloing the drums to tune them
individually listen to the melody and the chords.
So you can transpose right here I can transpose this too
I tried this before and three worked better.
It's more in tune with the song now this takes some experimentation so you can
try using the transposition here you can also go to controls here and use
detune which adjusts it by smaller increments
and I'm going to adjust the hi-hats a bit too I want the hi-hats to be
snappier so I'm going to transpose them up 11
semi-tones. That's cool. Then I have the snare over
here I'm going to transpose this up as well
five semitones and now listen
and with the instruments.
Much better the tune drums sound so much better and don't forget we used the
original samples from that sample loop
that we download from Splice.com. Now compare that to the original
drum beat
Now that drum beat was not tuned as well as this new one.
This is such a simple thing to do to make the drum loops unique
to you. Also once you have the individual drum samples
in a drum kit you can start adding effects to
the individual drum slices. So you'll see for the kick drum
I added drum bass for the snare I added a little bit of a reverb sound
without it... that's the original sample.... with a little reverb
and on the entire kit I put in Transient Master by Native Instruments and a
little bit of glue compressor.
Keep an eye on my channel for more tips and gear reviews and if you need some
help coming up with chord progressions you
can download my MIDI chord and sample "AURORA" pack...
link in the description!
Keep Making The Music You Love
and hey watch one of these videos next!
Thank you :)