One trick is to notice that each Drum Rack row starts with either C, E or G# and spans one of three keyboard patterns (red, green or blue in screen 1). (Hold down the Command/Control key to move by one row at a time.) While the correlation between Drum Rack pads and pads on a MIDI drum controller is obvious, it takes a little getting used to with MIDI keyboards. You select different groups of 16 pads by either click-dragging the View Selector in the Pad Overview to the left of the pads or by using your computer keyboard’s up and down arrow keys when the Pad Overview has the keyboard focus.

Live’s Drum Rack has 128 virtual pads and displays 16 pads (one quadrant) at a time. Keyboards don’t light up, but they are usually velocity sensitive and many offer Aftertouch. They’re also backlit to show which pads are filled and are sometimes colour-coded to indicate the type of content. Pads on the more modern controllers are velocity sensitive and can send MIDI Channel Pressure (Aftertouch) messages. Push, Launchpad Pro and other 64-pad drum controllers have their pads arranged in an eight-by-eight grid divided into four squares of 16 pads, which I’ll call quadrants. This month we’re going to look at the relationship between 64-pad controllers and keyboards and then delve into building your own 64-pad Drum Racks. If you don’t have a 64-pad button box (Push or the Novation Launchpad Pro, for example), you can still make good use of these techniques using your MIDI keyboard, and keyboard players may even find this easier. Having fingertip access to 64 Drum Rack pads is a must for serious finger drumming, and Ableton celebrates by offering the free Live pack ’64 Pad Lab’ by Mad Zach, which includes helpful Live Lessons and videos. We get tactile with Ableton Live’s Drum Rack.Īmong the notable improvements in the Live 9.2 update is the new 64 Pad mode for Ableton’s Push control surface. The corresponding MIDI keyboard layout is shown at the bottom. Push has four such groups ordered from bottom-left to top-right (Q1 to Q4). 1: The Drum Rack default view’s 16 pads span C1 to D#2 (left).

Mad zach 64 pad lab