Lining Up Snare Transients in Ableton

azzybish

4th Division Banger Merchant
Joined
Jan 20, 2013
So on most of the production tutorials i've watched they work with audio to manually line up the transients of their snares.

Is there any way to do this in an ableton drum rack? You can choose the starting sample position but i don't want to cut off the start of one snare to line it up with the other.

Or do i just have to freeze them and line it up that way?
 
I use ableton too and what I do is line up the snares on audio tracks, once the transients are lined up then consolidate each hit individually. the purpose of this so so when the sample are quantized in drum racks midi then the transients will still be synched up, optionally you can resample the snares once they're lined up, then crop the resampled part which achieves the same thing - when you draw the snares on in the midi piano roll they'll still be in sync.

long story short I sync up the transients first as described above, then I slap it into drum racks. hope this makes sense.
 
a few ways you can do it, depending on how you setup your drum kits - no need to freeze or switch to working audio (and doing that isn't really needed with Ableton flexibility)

to do it via midi, you can hold down CTRL as you drag the midi note (in v8) and it will allow you move the note tiny amounts without snapping ot the grid, in v9 you don't have to hold CRTL, just drag it slowly

or you can use the Track Delay (hit the D button on the master channel, in scene view, you will then see a new control on the mixer), you can set it to milliseconds or samples - this will only work if you have the snare on its own channel (otherwise it'll delay the whole kit) - this method is probably easiest to implement, coz you can adjust the delay easily and hear the result as its playing, a bit like using the pitch fader on a pair of decks


track delay is the best option imo, and doing it by ear gives better results too, every transient is different, and the visual peak isn't neccesarly the best point to match up
 
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Also try flipping the phase. Sometimes no matter how much I eq a break or try and just the alignment I can't get it to sound good. Then all it takes is to flip the phase and it's locked in.

I try this with pretty much every sound now. Especially stabs that are playing in unison with another hit
 
a few ways you can do it, depending on how you setup your drum kits - no need to freeze or switch to working audio (and doing that isn't really needed with Ableton flexibility)

to do it via midi, you can hold down CTRL as you drag the midi note (in v8) and it will allow you move the note tiny amounts without snapping ot the grid, in v9 you don't have to hold CRTL, just drag it slowly

or you can use the Track Delay (hit the D button on the master channel, in scene view, you will then see a new control on the mixer), you can set it to milliseconds or samples - this will only work if you have the snare on its own channel (otherwise it'll delay the whole kit) - this method is probably easiest to implement, coz you can adjust the delay easily and hear the result as its playing, a bit like using the pitch fader on a pair of decks


track delay is the best option imo, and doing it by ear gives better results too, every transient is different, and the visual peak isn't neccesarly the best point to match up

Never knew about that, gonna give it a look tomorrow :D
 
Never knew about that, gonna give it a look tomorrow :D

track delay FTW!!

can actually do some nice things to the groove of a beat by playing with the delay, speed things up by pulling it back, slow it down by pushing it forward (individual drums); also great for giving vocals a little extra space...just a few ms is all that's needed

double up channels aswell, then shift the track delay on one of them, for sum interesting phase effects
 
You could always add a little bit of silence to the start of each hit, to give you some room to play with in the drum rack when adjusting start points...
 
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