> Step by step

4. Building a remixing instrument

1 We should now have a decent library of bespoke sounds, and our goal now is to get them all working together. We’re using Ableton Live 9’s Drum Rack, but you can do the same in any sampler that can hold multiple samples. Load in all the rendered samples from our previous tutorial (also found in the Sample Exports folder) onto separate pads – each will be placed in a new Simpler instrument. 2 Ableton Live’s Drum Rack has different sample playback modes. We’ll leave it at the default 1-Shot mode, but we’ll change the Mode from Trigger to Gate. This mode only plays the samples for the duration a note is held. Now right-click on the Gate button and select Copy Value to Siblings. This is a quick way of copying a setting to all the other sample pads. 3 A good place to start is to establish a sample’s root key, and then make sure all the other sounds fit. Locate the Pianocomp1 sample. This sample has a clear pitch to it, so we’ll use this as the reference. It could work well as a stab, but for our remix it might work better pitched down for a deeper sound. Grab the Transpose dial and turn it down to -4 st (semitones), making the sound an F minor. 4 Pitch all the other sounds up or down to fit the key, using the piano as reference. There’s no set rules here, so just go with whatever you think sounds best. It’s also a good time to adjust the Volume dial in each Simpler, to balance out the levels between the samples. Once we’ve got everything balanced, we can move on and process each sound. 5 Locate the Pad-reverb sample. We’ve pitched this sample down by -4 semitones, but it could use some extra top-end sparkle. Expand the Drum Rack, right-click the sample’s channel and select Duplicate to create a copy. Pitch this new channel to +8 semitones (an octave above the first). We can process this new layer independently with some 6 For the Vox-mi sample, change the Mode to Classic. Turn on Looping, then drag the sample Start amount up to around 35%. Turn the Attack dial to 1.5ms to remove the initial click, then set Release to around 1.5s for a slight trail-off in level. Have a jam with your sounds to find out what works together – you’ll most likely kickstart an interesting idea along the way!