Ableton 8 - Beat Programming

sven laux · Post by **sven laux** » Wed May 20, 2009 8:50 am

Hey there,

for years I'm working with Reason and Ableton via ReWire, but now I want to change to Ableton completely.

Is it possible to create a beat using the Impulse without using the piano roll? How do you create your "beats"?

For me it's not really inspiring to copy and paste the red squares...

Thanks for any help.

Lord_Iron · Post by **Lord_Iron** » Wed May 20, 2009 11:45 am

You can use any midi controler like a keyboard or a drum pad. I use de korg nanopad and it works great.

You can use also your computer keyboard to make your beats, I used to do it before I had the nanopad and it works good.

Btw the mapping of the Impulse is: C3, D3, E3, F3, G3, A3, B3, C4

If you wanna use your computer keyboard as a midi controller remember you have to press that small button that looks like a piano on the top right of the screen.

Greetz

4am · Post by **4am** » Wed May 20, 2009 1:58 pm

hmmm..... entering the beat is not the big problem, you can more or less use whatever you want...
at first sight the editing of midi clips in live doesn't look very confortable. but on the other side it offers advantages like the possibility to draw your own midi cc automations directly on the clip (that you can also import in session view) and so on...
i was also very sceptic and found it a mess, and that's one of the reasons that made me program drums mainly out of the box, now i'm more used to it and find even better than hardware... in some cases

hydrogen · Post by **hydrogen** » Wed May 20, 2009 3:00 pm

In live 8 you you can also use the keyboard only to make edits and copy and manipulate notes around.

AVX23 · Post by **AVX23** » Wed May 20, 2009 3:03 pm

hydrogen wrote:In live 8 you you can also use the keyboard only to make edits and copy and manipulate notes around.

Interesting - I've been looking for a way to do that for a while.

Is it easy to setup ?

hydrogen · Post by **hydrogen** » Thu May 21, 2009 10:37 am

sure just draw in one note... then use ctrl-d to duplicate and then the arrow keys to move... some different combinations of alt-arrow or ctrl-arrow will do different things... sorry i don't remember the specifics... but it works.

habitueE · Post by **habitueE** » Thu May 21, 2009 3:49 pm

just out of curiosity , how would you go about programming your beats in reason?

sven laux · Post by **sven laux** » Sat May 23, 2009 1:34 pm

habitueE wrote:just out of curiosity , how would you go about programming your beats in reason?

Thanks for all the hints, guys.

Well, in Reason I would use up to 2 or 4 ReDrums and copy and paste it into arrangement view. After that I destroy the loop to get some chaos...