The beat is done. The hats sit right, the clap lands where you want it, and you finally drop the bassline in. Then the low end turns to mud, so you put a compressor on the bass, open the sidechain section, and go looking for the kick in the source list. It is not there. What you find is a single entry called Drums, the whole kit, hats and claps and percussion included. Sidechaining the bass to that is useless.
The compressor is not the problem. The problem was decided twenty minutes earlier, when you dropped every sample into one drum rack and gave the kick nowhere of its own to live.
This article fixes that at the root. You will build a drum rack from scratch, pull the kick out onto its own track, and save the whole thing so you never have to do the setup again.
Why the kick leaves the rack
A drum rack is one device on one track. Everything inside it shares a single output, which has four consequences a beginner usually discovers too late.
The first is routing. Anything after the rack in the chain, and anything you send the track to, applies to the entire kit at once.
The second is processing. A compressor set to control the weight of a kick has an attack and release measured for a sound with a long decay. Put that same compressor across the full kit and it starts breathing on every hat.
The third is gain staging. The kick is usually the loudest single element in a dance track. When it is bundled with the rest of the kit, its level and the kit's level are the same fader, and you lose the ability to move one without the other.
The fourth is sidechaining, which is the one that sends most people looking for answers. Live's compressor can listen to any track in the set, but it cannot listen to one pad inside a rack. If the kick has no track, there is nothing to point at.
There is a way to route an individual chain out of a rack to its own audio track from inside the rack's input and output section. It works, and once you are comfortable in Live it is worth knowing. It is not where a beginner should start, because it hides the structure of the session behind a menu instead of showing it in the arrangement.
Phase 1: prepare the session
Open an empty set and make two MIDI tracks. Name the first KICK and the second DRUMS. Give them different colours.
This takes ten seconds and it is the whole point of the article. Every routing decision that follows is possible because these two tracks exist, and every one of them is awkward if they do not.
Phase 2: build the drum rack
On the DRUMS track, drag a Drum Rack from the browser. You get a grid of pads, each one mapped to a MIDI note. The visible sixteen pads are one page of the 128 notes available, and the small overview strip on the left scrolls through the rest.
Now drag samples onto the pads. Almost anything from the browser can be dropped onto a pad, and Live creates a chain with a Simpler already set to that pad's note.
Use a fixed layout rather than dropping samples wherever they land, and use this specific one rather than inventing your own. The course drum box is not just a sketchpad, it is eight fixed voices in a fixed order: BD, SD, LT, HT, CH, OH, CP, CY. Kick, snare, low tom, hi tom, closed hat, open hat, clap, cymbal. Give those eight voices eight consecutive MIDI notes in that same order, C1 through G1 (36 through 43), and whatever you sketch in the browser sits on the matching pad the moment you open Live, no translation step in between.
That is a deliberate trade-off worth naming. Live's Receive chooser shows a General MIDI label next to every note, and General MIDI does not agree with this order: C#1 (37) reads as Side Stick there, not Snare. Ignore that label on these eight pads. Matching the drum box beats matching a standard nobody in this course is exporting to yet.
Leave the kick pad empty for now, because the kick is going to live somewhere else, but do not use that pad for anything else. The first eight notes are the ones the drum box can sketch. Above that, rim shot, ride and, from note 60 upwards, a full percussion set for afro house and organic house: congas, shakers, hand percussion. Real pads for a real kit, they just do not exist in the browser sketchpad, so they never come up in the translation exercise later in this article.
One adjustment before you move on. Set the closed hat and the open hat to the same choke group, using the Choke chooser in the input and output section of each chain. Chains in the same choke group silence each other, which is exactly what a real hi-hat does when the pedal closes. Then balance the pads with the volume and pan controls in the chain list, so the kit already sits together before any mixing happens.
Phase 3: the kick on its own track
Go back to the KICK track and drag a Simpler onto it, then drop your kick sample into it.
Simpler rather than another drum rack, for a reason that pays off later. Simpler puts the volume envelope, the transpose control and the sample start point directly in front of you, and those three controls are how a kick gets shaped. A drum rack hides them one level down.
If you have already built the kit with the kick inside the rack, you do not have to start over, but the detail matters here. Go to the Session View mixer, select the kick chain's title bar, and drag it to the mixer's drop area. This creates a new track with the devices and the MIDI notes. If you drag the chain from the chain list instead, you get the devices only and the notes stay behind.
Phase 4: the routing that makes sidechain possible
Write a four-on-the-floor pattern on the KICK track and a simple hat and clap pattern on DRUMS. Add a bass on a third track.
Put a compressor on the bass. Open the sidechain section with the triangle at the left of the device, switch it on, and set the audio source to the KICK track. The compressor now ducks the bass every time the kick plays, and only the kick, because the hats are no longer part of that signal.
That is as far as this article goes on sidechaining. The technique has considerably more to it than ducking a bass, and it is covered properly in Creative sidechaining: beyond the kick and bass. What matters here is that the session is now built so the technique is available at all.
Phase 5: save it once
Two things are worth keeping.
The rack itself: save it as a preset and it lands in your user library, ready to drop into any project.
The session: use File > Save Live Set As Template, and it appears in the browser's Templates category. If you want this to be the starting point for everything, use File > Save Live Set As Default Set instead, and every new set opens with the kick already on its own track.
The same idea in other DAWs
The names change, the structure does not.
In FL Studio the channel rack gives every drum its own channel, but they only become independent when you route each one to its own mixer insert. Send the kick to a dedicated insert, then use Fruity Peak Controller or the compressor in Fruity Limiter to duck the bass from it.
In Logic Pro, Drum Machine Designer already creates a sub-track per pad, so the separation exists by default. The compressor has a side chain selector in the top right of the plugin window where you choose the kick track.
In Bitwig, the Drum Machine device works like Live's drum rack, and chains can be routed out to their own tracks in the same way.
Try it now
Before you touch Live, sketch a pattern in the course drum box below. Its eight rows, BD, SD, LT, HT, CH, OH, CP, CY, are the same eight sounds as the pad mapping above, in the same order. Reading a row in the drum box and finding the matching pad in Live is direct, because the two were built to match.
Build a 16-step pattern in the drum box above, then rebuild it in Live using the layout from this article, with the kick on its own track. Reading a pattern off a grid and reproducing it in a DAW is the fastest way to stop counting steps in your head and start hearing them. When it plays back the same, add a bass and set up the sidechain.
Download
The Ohxala starter pack contains the drum rack, the session with both tracks already routed, and the samples, all built on the mapping described above.
Sources and further reading
- Ableton reference manual, Instrument, Drum and Effect Racks
- Ableton reference manual, Managing Files and Sets, on template and default sets
- Ableton, Default Set and Template Sets
- Video: One Thing: Eric Dubois, Drum Rack routing
- Creative sidechaining: beyond the kick and bass, Ohxala Records
- Less is more: mastering your DAW with native plugins, Ohxala Records
- Design your kick: the anatomy of a sound by genre, Ohxala Records
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