How to control the TR-09 with Ableton Live & Push 2

Creating a MIDI Clip in Live

So back in Live, I'm just going to create an empty MIDI clip by double clicking.

Understanding MIDI Clip Configuration

Now, this isn't nested in a drum rack, so I'm not going to be able to program it in the same way as I would a normal drum pattern.

• I'm just going to use a little preview, sweep down the MIDI,
• The piano roll here to try and identify the notes that are triggering the drum sounds.

If you remember from any of the earlier lessons, these note numbers will start to look very familiar because there is a general MIDI assignment for drum sounds. Most drum machines tend to stick to those general MIDI assignments, with the odd exception, obviously.

Identifying Kick Drum

But it does make it quite ,

• It makes it a lot easier to locate specific drum sounds, generally, whatever device you're working on.

So there's that C1; that's our kick drum. Let me just draw in a couple of a selection of quarter notes there.

Simple Four-Four Beat

• We're just going to do a really simple four-four beat.
• I'm going to start this playing immediately so you can hear what's going on.

Let's find a different sound. Let's just use that clap sound.

Okay, we've got a fairly standard straight four-four beat there, with a few of the different sounds that we might want to use going on.

Sequencing in Live

This is great because I can sequence from inside Live.

• I don't need to use the 909 sequencer,
• So my sequences can remain congruent to the rest of the content of my session.

But I can still get hands-on with the device here and adjust the sounds themselves while we're playing.

Grouping and Transforming

I'm just going to take this a little step further now and group this. In the second chain of this instrument rack, I'm going to drop a drum rack , an empty one , just so that we transform the view on the push here to a standard drum programming.

• Now, although the notes aren't lighting up because this drum rack isn't populated,
• We can at the very least see the sequencing that's occurring at the top.

Playing and Modifying Patterns

Okay, so that's great.

• We can do some sequencing.
• We can play the pattern from here.
• We can modify the sounds from here.
• And we can play patterns from here.

That's great fun!

Enhancing Tactile Interaction

But again, as I say, in the live environment, it's going to be difficult to interact with those knobs.

So what I'm going to do is:

• I'm going to bring in another MIDI controller.
• I'm going to map some of those knobs to that external MIDI controller to give me a little bit of a better tactile interface for those kind of key controls.