Ableton Session Drums - or what?

[jdbunda]

I just started working with Live 7.0.14, it came with the M-Audio Profire 610 I just bought. I was disappointed to find NO drum loops or drum machine included in the package. I am a guitarist looking to do songwriting/demo recording, at least for now.

I'm not necessarily looking for the Absolute Best Possible - at this point, just a variety of styles with some variations for verse/chorus etc. would be great.

I have seen several moderately-priced MIDI drum loop packages online, and Ableton offers Session Drums as an add-on. Ableton's bias toward the electronic is a bit of a put-off, I don't need 50 variations of house/dub/industrial, I am more interested in "traditional" rock/blues/jazz styles. Any recommendations to get this recording noob started? Thanks!

John

[Cailyn]

While there are more electronic sets, there are plenty of acoustic sets in Session Drums to choose from that will cover any style of jazz, blues, or rock that you might want to do. They come with a lot of beats but I have never used them so I can't tell you how useful they are.

[jdbunda]

Thanks for the reply, Cailyn. Session Drums seems like overkill for what I want, but I'm still so new to this game, I just don't know. Do I really need the ability to control miking and pick individual drum kits? Seems like a package of midi loops would serve me just fine.

By the way, I checked out your EP on myspace, did you record that with Live? If so, did you record live drums?

[Cailyn]

Session drums comes in two modes: LE and multimic. LE assumes one mic per drum and is fairly simple to use. Multimic has all the extra levels of sophistication but you can ignore this mode if you choose. Either way, you get some excellent samples.

My EP was recorded in Live but the drums were programmed and the samples were the native samples in Impulse which aren't all that good. No amount of tinkering could make them sound better. I'll be posting a song tonight: Heartland, which is me drumming on an electronic kit and using the samples in Session drums in LE mode. Check that out as a better example.

[Dinaiz]

I love your version of the new world symphony by the way ;-)

[Cailyn]

Thank you!