Ableton Sampled Instruments – Session Drums

Session Drums is a meticulously multisampled library of acoustic drums that reproduces the nuances of a recording session and puts you in the engineer's seat. Session Drums gives you full control of the close mics for each drum as well as the overheads and room mics, so you can craft the perfect drum mix for your songs. Session Drums also includes stereo kits appropriate for various musical styles and a variety of MIDI grooves to speed up the production process.

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Created in collaboration with Chocolate Audio, makers of the acclaimed Imperial Drums, Session Drums delivers great natural-sounding acoustic drums to Ableton Live users. Session Drums covers a wide range of styles and offers deep customization capabilities, all from within Live's familiar workflow.

Session Drums puts you in complete control of the drum mix. Each instrument within Session Drums has been painstakingly multisampled, so you'll have all the flexibility of a studio session drummer at your fingertips. Each drum has also been simultaneously recorded from different microphone positions—close, overhead and room—allowing you to dial in just the right amount of each. For added realism, each drum also includes "bleed" samples, which let you mix in the ambient resonance of the snare. You have a choice of playing with a variety of sticks, mallets or brushes. You can even choose different types of kick drum beaters. Each drum and microphone uses a separate channel, so you can conveniently mix, add effects and swap drums to customize your kit. With Session Drums you can load up a brush kit, replace the snare, play the ride cymbal with a mallet, drop the close mics out of the mix (leaving just the overhead and room mics), add a little bleed to the mix from the mic placed below the snare, tune the kick drum down a bit, or customize any other way you can imagine.

1. Session Drums use Live 7's Drum Rack feature for seamless integration with Live's workflow. Each drum in a kit occupies its own pad for easy access. Global macro controls are provided for adjusting the kit's overall characteristics.
2. For more detailed control over the sound of each drum, double-click its pad to reveal parameters such as the volume of the kick drum's close mic.
3. Drop effects behind the Drum Rack to process the mix or onto the pads to process individual drums.
4. In the mixer, unfold the drum track to reveal individual channel strips for each drum. This makes it easy to mix drums in the context of a project.
5. Adjust the mix of direct, overhead and room mics, as well as snare "bleed"—each has its separate channel, just like in the recording studio.

Session Drums also includes stereo kits already mixed down for different musical styles. A collection of MIDI grooves by renowned session drummer Shawn Pelton are available in an array of styles and patterns for quick song-building and musical inspiration.

Key Features

• 28GB of drums sampled at 24-bit.
• Meticulously multisampled in a variety of velocities and articulations.
• All samples are preprocessed for a well-balanced sound.
• A collection of multimic drum kits and instruments.
• Drum Racks with an inline Session View mixer allow versatile mixing of each drum and its mics—close, overheads, room mics and the snare bleed. Each drum channel can have its own effects and routing.
• Each drum in a Drum Rack features 8 preprogrammed macro controls for quick tweaking of parameters such as drum tuning.
• Customize or create your own multimic drum kits—drag in or hot swap presets for each drum.
• A versatile selection of drums including:
  • Kicks in various sizes with felt, wood or plastic beaters, miked with dynamic or condenser mics. Miked with inside and outside mics for extra mixing flexibility.
  • Snares in many sizes and materials, including maple, birch, chrome, brass and bronze. Samples of different striking area—from the center to the outer portions of the drum head to the rim—and alternating left- and right-hand hits for each velocity. Miked with top and bottom mics for extra mixing flexibility.
  • Hi Hats in a variety of sizes with samples played via the pedal and tip or shank of the stick. Features MIDI control of the hi hat pedal—perfect for controlling with a mod wheel or pedal—allowing dynamic playing of the width of the open hi hat. Includes samples of alternating left- and right-hand hits for each velocity.
  • Ride cymbals featuring samples played on the bell, middle and edge of the cymbal. Also includes crash, splash and china cymbals mixable via overhead and room mics.
  • Toms in various sizes with alternating left- and right-hand samples for each velocity. Includes mixable close, overhead and room mics, and bleed via the bottom snare mic.
  • Also includes cowbell and tambourine samples.
• Play with a choice of sticks, Hotrods, mallets or brushes.
• Stereo drum kits—professionally produced and mixed down—delivering a variety of popular drum sounds ranging from 70s rock to funk to country.
• Includes MIDI grooves in various styles and patterns by professional session drummer Shawn Pelton that can be used with both stereo and multimic kits.
• Perfectly integrated into Live's environment—the kits are loaded via Drum Racks containing multiple Simplers, which are included with Live 7.
• Uses Live 7's new SmartPriming resource-efficient sample engine, which optimizes CPU resources and lets you work with an impressive number of instruments in your compositions.

What is SmartPriming?
Using large sampled instrument libraries can quickly eat valuable computer resources and slow down the creative process. Ableton Live 7 introduces SmartPriming, a new resource-saving sample playback technology allowing users of large sample libraries—such as Ableton's Session Drums—to use many instruments in their compositions. Due to Simpler and Sampler's tight integration with Ableton Live, SmartPriming automatically reallocates resources in real time from where they are no longer needed to where they are, without interrupting workflow. Once a sampled instrument is sequenced, Live knows the amount of resources required to play that instrument back and unloads all unused samples to open resources for the next instrument the composer decides to play. Essentially, SmartPriming is an under-the-hood technology that allows Live users to get the most from their computer's resources and take advantage of the realism and expressiveness provided by professional multisampled instruments.

System Requirements:

• Session Drums requires Ableton Live 7 or higher.
• The installation size of Session Drums is 28 GB.