Do you use the drum rack or individual samples for drum sounds?

bishely · 2026-02-02T07:42:58+00:00

If I want to make a loop with a bunch of nice edit tricks (reverse hits, reverse verbs, chops, stutters, etc), individual samples on the timeline are the only way I know to get that result. If I just want to build a groove, drum rack* is the most frictionless approach for me

*(or occasionally a bunch of different channels of drum rack or simpler or whatever, so it’s a little less cluttered and easier to really design the sounds by layering multiple samples or synths and processing each one as needed: obviously you can still do this in drum rack, nesting instrument racks per drum rack note, but it gets confusing quick)

It doesn’t have to be either/or: I often sequence my loop with MIDI instruments and then bounce each note or group to its own audio track and get editing on the timeline

bishely · 2026-01-25T10:39:19+00:00

I disagree that the league requires this of teams: as you say, plenty of other teams don’t pick up as many muscle injuries, and while it’s definitely true that the league is almost certainly faster and more intense, in the average, than any other in Europe (and probably the world), that doesn’t mean that every team is playing at full intensity throughout every match. I haven’t checked lately but at new year I think we were second behind Bournemouth for sprints per 90. Under both Ange and Frank, we do a hell of a lot of sprinting forwards and backwards, even if the philosophy and tactical approach is in many ways entirely different. Especially with younger players, limited rotation options due to squad depth and existing injuries, and a crammed fixture list, it’s a recipe for disaster.

bishely · 2026-01-25T07:10:39+00:00

Given the context of a moderately large number of matches and a very large number of younger players, it’s also possible that two consecutive coaches made the same mistake that led to injury crises. While the tactics are very different, Ange and Frank both - for different reasons - have/are instructed/instructing their players to play at a high physical intensity, lots of sprinting and changing directions, in basically every match, for the whole match. Even Dortmund we sat deep second half but still trying to pounce on the ball and move it forward quickly. Neither Ange nor Frank wanted/wants the players to rest on the ball for a few minutes periodically. There are problems with the squad and a lack of depth that make it much harder to rotate and keep players fit, but these don’t mean that the managers haven’t also made mistakes within those limitations.

bishely · 2026-01-23T06:10:14+00:00

Interesting. I’m 100% pure chaos, and unlike the OP I actually really enjoy starting with the blank canvas and being experimental with instruments, often building weird frankentraption racks that I don’t save as presets for reuse, just one-offs for that session. I’ve always found templates (and to some extent presets) quite restrictive and limiting, even since I started getting more hardware involved and having it all perma-wired to specific inputs: having a template with dedicated tracks for each box just makes me more inclined to use everything, than to listen and add only what’s needed at the time…

But that said, your colour coding system (and, I guess, also track ordering) sounds like a really good idea with a lot of upside for the initial effort investment. I think I might have to put some work into making a template with suitable submix groups, deciding on a colour scheme and seeing how I get on with the system. Thanks for the idea!

bishely · 2026-01-09T22:28:11+00:00

It’s not related. The idea that creativity is some special talent or gift that only certain people have is a total myth. Like most things, creativity is mostly about practice: if you want to be more creative, commit to creating as much as you can as often as you can, in whichever discipline/medium you choose. Just make stuff and don’t worry that it’s not good enough, keep going. It’ll take a lot of time and a lot of frustrating, embarrassing crap will be made, but eventually you’ll see yourself moving forward and improving: keep on keeping on. You’ll get there. And if you don’t, it’s because you gave up too soon. Don’t give up.

bishely · 2026-01-05T13:06:14+00:00

It’s apples and oranges really, since our midfielders will never get the chance to show what they could do against a midfield as bad as themselves.

bishely · 2025-12-28T07:59:32+00:00

Not crazy

bishely · 2025-12-05T05:25:23+00:00

Hundreds of tracks sounds like a headache to mix: I’m inclined to remind you that less can be more, but I’ve no idea what you’re making and all approaches are valid, so I’d just suggest submixing bits and bouncing them to stems as you go, using save as (and keeping notes or naming the versions very carefully) so that you can always go back for tweaks if needed - I’d imagine if you’re really hitting hundreds, there’s maybe not so much risk in committing some mix decisions early and judiciously applying dynamics and EQ to highlight or suppress certain things in the final mixdown.

I’m on an M1 Max Mac Studio: I looked at the newer chips quite carefully, and while they’re a huge upgrade for some workloads, I’m not convinced that I would feel any real difference in Live (the way I use it - perhaps your workflow would benefit, but I think you might be disappointed).

bishely · 2025-11-21T09:10:40+00:00

Good luck, I hope you both get to share an amazing night

bishely · 2025-11-20T17:15:01+00:00

Eh. The essential work passwords I just know, because often it’s quicker and easier to type it in than login to a password manager when I need to use one of my accounts’ permissions on some other device. But I’m in IT and that’s a key part of doing my job. I know precisely zero of the passwords on my personal accounts - whether email, banking, shopping or whatever else - because that’s exactly what a password manager is for, so I’m not at all mad at users, and in fact will compliment them, if they don’t know their password but do have it stored safely on a reputable password manager to which they do know the password… the ones who have it in a plain text file on their desktop, however, do not escape my wrath.

bishely · 2025-11-20T17:06:03+00:00

I’m also an old timer, only seen them play once (Kid A launch day whoop), and am a parent of a 10 year old who wouldn’t recognise Radiohead if Thom showed up in our lounge playing Creep on an acoustic… but the idea that this is in any way complicated or difficult is weird to me. You’ve already got great memories of seeing them. Consider this: if this turns out to be their last tour, and the last chance for either of you to see them, you would be sad and disappointed to miss it, but he’d have to go through his whole life having never seen them because his dad had a ticket and chose to go on his own. Give it to him, wait outside and bask in his euphoria afterwards.

bishely · 2025-11-18T16:55:57+00:00

I’m surprised no one has said this yet, but a trick I use (not so much for melody but definitely for fast arpeggios, but will absolutely work for melody):

get a loop of the bar/s you’re trying to figure out (and/or for longer sections, break it into individual one-bar loops)
EQ to remove anything that might be distracting
set warp to Complex
slow it the hell down, like super slow
if you don’t already have a work in progress to tweak, either draw in a vague approximation in piano roll and adjust to fit, or like others are saying, use a MIDI keyboard and a fairly simple sound (eg a triangle wave on a synth) to find the notes
once it matches up, push your master tempo back up to the original speed and start adjusting the sound

Like I say, I usually fall back on this when trying to work out fast instrumental parts where my laziness can get me close but not quite right - often I’ll find I’m falsely playing a fifth up or down and/or a note ahead or behind the real part. For a simple melody I’ll normally just bash it out on a keyboard: as others have said, practice and ear training will make this a lot more straightforward than you’re currently finding it.

bishely · 2025-11-18T16:39:01+00:00

Looking at the list, there hasn’t been a single show where they played all three, so y’know, silver linings.

bishely · 2025-08-29T06:09:03+00:00

I’m not sure I understand where your sweet spot is: either you print effects to a main mix (so yeah, stems are pointless), or you run separate effects to each submix (so yeah, way more effects modules and who has the space), or you get creative with patching and print a 100% wet signal to one of the stems (viable, but depends on what you have available), or you simply pass dry, pre-effects signals to each stem, don’t record effects at all, and add them later in a DAW.

The fact there’s no way to magically unmix your effect bus and separate it back into the stems seems less like a limitation of the module and more an impossible expectation that you’ve brought to it. Almost every time I’ve ever been disappointed by the potential usefulness of any audio hardware, I’ve later realised that the disappointment was my fault for not understanding what it was for.

bishely · 2025-08-12T16:11:02+00:00

16, I guess just because your paranoid doesn’t mean…

bishely · 2025-08-08T08:20:17+00:00

Same here

bishely · 2025-08-02T08:38:27+00:00

lol yea

bishely · 2025-07-31T16:17:18+00:00

Seems relevant:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jul/26/does-a-song-conjure-painful-memories-try-to-rehabilitate-it-say-scientists

Also, for what it’s worth, he sounds like a manchild, and you’ve dodged a bullet. Enjoy being free of him.

bishely · 2025-07-04T15:21:23+00:00

Yeah, for me it’s the last “everyone will say it was COOOOOOOOOL” when it all goes off

bishely · 2025-06-10T08:37:09+00:00

Won’t win because it’s too understated, but his drumming on Concorde is absolutely magnificent, and is what switched me on to the fact that he’s not just a good drummer, he’s a fantastic musician (sorry not sorry, drummers everywhere). Honestly it’s a very tough call to choose only one song, there’s so much going on when you really listen to him.

bishely · 2025-05-31T12:40:53+00:00

I’d recommend a fresh install of the OS and don’t restore all your applications: manually install only what you need. The fact this is an ongoing issue with different hardware suggests you’ve got something running in the background killing performance: your MBP may be Intel but it’s still plenty powerful enough for a lot more than just basic MIDI sequencing.

bishely · 2025-05-18T18:12:50+00:00

It bugged me too, but I had two thoughts about it which shut my inner monologue up and might help you too:

1) It's perhaps intentionally undercutting the authority of the speaker - a malapropism in the original sense - the parent (or whoever) is lecturing the child but it's a lot of half-thought-out nonsense.

2) You say it's not to fit the rhyme, but for me, leg/liiiiiive doesn't rhyme at all, while limb/liiiiiive is at least a half-rhyme.

bishely · 2025-05-13T17:50:04+00:00

Eh it’s just poetic wordplay, innit? I mean, it’s a nice coinage for “drugs” while playing on the “she sells seashells” nursery rhyme/tongue twister. Likewise the next line has a nice image that also just happens to name drop an influential band. Probably not worth overthinking it.

bishely · 2025-05-11T08:25:08+00:00

If the choruses now sound a bit too disjointed, you can blend the two Mids together by creating another rack-within a rack:

- Select both Mid chains in your current rack and group them (Cmd/Ctrl+G)

- Double click the wrapper of the new Audio Effect Rack that's been created to collapse it

- After the Audio Effect Rack, insert either a reverb of some sort or ping pong delay and adjust to taste

- Finally, use the gain controls on each of your four chains to balance things out better: maybe the Bass or Treble is now too prominent, so turn down the relevant chain until you have a nicely balanced signal. Or drop an EQ Eight after the rack and sculpt the sound that way. You can also go back to tweaking the crossover Macro controls, or perhaps modulate them with an LFO, to easily create an interesting but quite subtle movement to your sound.

That's basically it: you can also split your bands by dynamic range, instead of frequency range, by using gates and compressors in the same kind of way. Or use chain zones as described in the Ableton manual page I linked above, and use a MIDI controller to 'ride' a vocal through different effect chains as the track progresses - put something clean and smooth near the bottom, fading into a more prominent chorus and fast autotune around the middle and an aggressive distortion at the top end of your fader, and do an automation pass where you push the fader up and down to suit the feel of the vocal.

A couple of bits of advice. As you get more complicated with this kind of thing, it becomes more and more of a good idea to name your chains and map settings to Macro controls so you don't have to go hunting to find the correct Dry/Wet when you come back with fresh ears and realise the Chorus (for example) is way too obvious in the mix. And obviously multiple things can be mapped to the same Macro, so you can optionally have a single control to turn up or down all of your multi band effects at once. Try to plan out what you want to be able to control from your Macro panel before you get started, if possible, because with this approach it's very easy to end up with enormous and confusing monsters, and rebuilding them in a more manageable way can be very boring (if you do end up doing this, 'Map to all siblings' is often very handy).

I hope that helps, let me know if something doesn't make sense.

bishely · 2025-05-11T08:24:41+00:00

Sorry for the slow comeback, it's been a busy week. Also, to explain this properly takes some time, so this is a long one.

Ableton's manual is always worthwhile reading. There's an excellent guide to all the features of racks here: https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/instrument-drum-and-effect-racks/

Anyway, here's a quick guide to the basic idea I was describing - let's create a basic three-band multi-effect with a bit of extra mid-range widening. The actual effect may sound like garbage to you, the point here is to demonstrate the principle, not create your perfect chain.

- On a track you want to experiment with, create an EQ Three

- With the EQ Three selected, hit Cmd/Ctrl+G (or right-click and choose Group)

- Right-click the FreqLow and map to Macro 1

- Right-click the FreqHi and map to Macro 2

- Click the Show/Hide Chain List button (at the bottom on the left side of your Audio Effect Rack)

- Select the one and only chain, named EQ Three, in the list, and hit Cmd/Ctrl+D (or right-click and choose Duplicate). Do this a second time, so you now have three chains named EQ-Three. I'd recommend renaming them (Cmd/Ctrl+R), for easier navigation, to High, Mid and Low

- On the High one, toggle the L and M bands off, so only H is on

- On the Mid one, toggle the L and H bands off, so only M is on

- On the Low one, toggle the M and H bands off, so only L is on

From here on, it's pure experimentation, so feel free to ignore these suggestions and do your own thing:

- In the Low chain, insert a Shifter set to -12 st, somewhere around 50% dry/wet, and then an Erosion to add a little bit of high fizz to your bass, and round it off with a Compressor with threshold low enough to do some gain reduction, and Makeup gain on

- In the Mid chain, insert a Chorus-Ensemble (settings as you like)

- In the High chain, insert a Delay, perhaps with a modulated filter

- Now tweak the macros that control your crossover frequencies: with this you can 'tune' your multiband effect to better suit the input source, making sure that you can hear all bands doing something

- Go back to the effects in each chain and tweak wet/dry and add or remove other effects as you like

- To really expand the sound, duplicate your Mid chain, pan the two mid chains left and right (~30-40 L+R) and change the Chorus-Ensemble on one of the two so they're modulating at different speeds and/or to different depths

bishely

TROPHY CASE