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Track Tuning

Tuning your track to a musical key is one of the simplest ways to improve how it sounds. When your kick, bass and melodic parts agree on the same notes, the bass sounds tighter, chords sit cleanly over the top and the whole mix feels more deliberate.

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Creating Dance Drums

A dance beat is led by a kick drum on every beat. It opens with a “smack”, followed by a deep bass tail. It keeps time, but needs the support of other percussive elements to add a sense of character and energy.

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Drum Rack

Drum Rack is where most beats in Live begin. It looks like a classic 4×4 grid of pads, but each pad is really a container. It can hold any instrument (a sample in Drum Sampler or Simpler, a Drum Synth, Operator, even a third-party plug-in) plus its own chain of effects.

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Impulse

Impulse is Ableton’s original drum sampler and has been a fixture of Live for many years. It holds eight samples, one per slot, mapped across a single octave from C3 upwards.

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Drum Sampler

Drum Sampler is Ableton’s newest sampler, added to Live in version 12.1. It’s built for one job: playing back single hits, such as kicks, snares, hats and percussion, inside a Drum Rack.

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