Ableton Live AfroDJRack #50: Unusual Percussion 2

March 7, 2012 Brian Funk

This week's free Ableton Live AfroDJRack is a continuation in the my study in unusual percussion. I've been looking for new ways to create percussion sounds and this download is the result. This week I have a total of 309 different sounds for you to play around with. More importantly, though, I show you the technique I used to quickly create loads of unique sounds. If you missed part one, check it out here. I began this Ableton Live project by sampling some ordinary sounds. I recorded the sound of pencil and eraser on paper. Then I tore the paper (I felt inspired by this awesome video with Robot Koch). I snapped my fingers and rubbed my hands together, and recorded that. Next, I tapped my foot on the mic stand, which created some surprisingly bass-y kick drum like sounds. After that I took out my Casio SK-1, which is a sampling keyboard from the 80s, very lo-fi. I sampled crackles, drum sounds and even noises created by plugging in an instrument cable and touching the end to create buzzes. All of those sounds were sent into Ableton and are on the track labeled "Original percussion." Feel free to do what you like to those sounds.

From there I played around with the clips I created, reversing some and messing around with the transpose envelope. Next I set them up to play somewhat randomly using follow actions, and recorded the result on to another audio track. The resulting clip was then "sliced to midi" and that created the drum rack on track 5 "AfroDJMac Unusual Perc NOFX."

I then repeated the process of randomly triggering clips and resampling them, but this time I placed a host of effect racks on the track which I turned on and off and manipulated at random, using an iPad running the Lemur app. This yielded two more instrument racks, found on tracks 3 and 4. In the end, this download features 309 different percussive sounds!

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Follow along in the video above, as I show you exactly how I did this and try applying this technique to your own sounds. You can literally use anything. Part of the fun of this method is that you don't really know what you are going to get when you begin. I hope you have fun messing around with the sounds I have provided for you here!

As you may have noticed, this is the 50th week of my free Ableton Live Racks! It's been really awesome hearing back from so many people about how they've used all these sounds, and really inspiring to learn some of your own techniques. Thanks so much for following and in case you missed any, below are links to them all. Have fun!

AfroDJMac Devices for Ableton Live

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<3 AfroDJMac