Quick Tip: How To Emulate MPC-Style Sample Cut-Off In Ableton Live
Tutorial Details
- Difficulty: Intermediate
- Time: 10 minutes
- Requirements: Ableton Live
Ableton Live offers users an fun and innovative way to make music using a very unique workflow. Users coming from a hardware environment may initial be a little put off by Ableton’s user interface and functionality, but it can mimic and surpass many features of popular hardware sequencers.
One of the most popular and influential pieces of hardware production gear ever is the Akai MPC series. For users of the MPC series, Ableton’s Drum Racks feature can mimic many of the more popular functions of the MPC, including monophonic sample cutoffs.
Step 1
Load up a sample into a session view slot. It can be a .WAV file, REX loop, Acidized .WAV file, .AIFF file, or even an MP3.
Step 2
Move your transient markers to your desired positions. Warp the clip using your preferred warp settings. For maximum fluidity, I suggest chops of no less than one full beat. Shorter sample lengths will not require such automated cut-off, usually.
Step 3
Right click the warped clip, and select slice to MIDI, using the appropriate slice settings. You will then see a new MIDI channel with your sliced sample mapped to individual pads in a Ableton drum rack instrument.
Step 4
Here is where it gets interesting. Select the MIDI track containing the drum rack. In the lower half of the screen you will see your drum rack and it’s control parameters. In the top row of its control parameters will be the envelope functions – Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release.
Turn the Release knob all the way to the right, which numerically should be 60.0 s You may also turn your Attack knob all the way to the left to 0 in order to get a quick response when you press a pad.
Step 5
Remaining in Session View, return to the drum rack channel. At the top of the channel will be a downward pointing triangle, right next to the name of the chopped loop. Click the triangle to open the channels for each individual slice.
Step 6
In the input/output area of the slice channels is a dropdown menu labeled choke. This allows you to assign each channel to a choke group. Channels that share the same choke group setting essentially mute one another. In practice this means that you can set all of your channels to the same choke group, and make your drum rack pads silence each other as you play them, just like they would on an MPC.
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By Kareem Ruth
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Nice trick!
I knew about the whole midi-slice options, but the choke groups were new to me!
thank you!
Do you know if there is any way to assign multiple pads/samples/channels to the same choke group (or any chain parameter for that matter) without having to assign each one manually? i.e. select chains 1-10 and assign them to choke group 1.
I have a slicing preset that will assign all samples chopped from a particular clip to the same choke group, but then if I want to add more samples from another clip (let’s say I got 25 slices from clip 1) I have to either assign each new slice one by one, or, because I also can’t seem to move multiple clips up or down the drum rack, add 25 warp markers before the audio in clip 2, mark the parts I want, slice to midi, delete chains 1-25 (which are just silence) and move the remaining chains to my original drum rack.
Hopefully that made some sort of sense, and if you know of any ways around the apparent lack of batch editing it would be much appreciated. Thanks for the tutorial
^ yes there is. And there is an easier way to do this tut. On the Drum Rack, you will see the view options just below the power button. Click on the show device button (third down) and it will add more view options, one being an “i/o” button. Your chain list should be visible at this point. Clicking the “i/o” button will show a “choke” option, and you can assign as many choke groups as you want, by assigning them a number in the choke box.