Beatserv has a large collection of samples taken from vintage drum machines (extracted and sent to us from Matt Walker, I think). We’ve been toying with ideas on what to do with them for a while now, and I’ve made a couple beats with them, but I finally started a project that’s fun, useful, educational, and simple at its core.

I’m creating drum kits in Ableton Live that follow the source hardware, but remain useful in a DAW. I’m not a gear slut, so I’m seriously not attached to any usability quirks the old hardware has. In full disclosure, I never have actually used any of the old hardware, so this project involves a fair amount of research on my part. At first it may seem ridiculous that I’m emulating hardware I’ve never used, but I understand the need for sound generation and usability above nostalgia. Think of it like running the hardware through a Beatserv filter. Each of the kits has useful dials for compression, reverb, EQ scale, more extensive ADSR and other settings that the original units often didn’t (Don’t worry, I’m retaining as much vintage character as I can stomach, with controls like “Snappy” and “Accent”). I’m also adding a “motion” dial to each kit, which is a chain of effects unique to each rack that adds a little extra Beatserv spice.

Part of the fun is that the whole project is currently in Ableton Live, and only uses Live effects and features. In the past, our kits have started in NI Battery and moved to Live. Those massive kits don’t quite follow the agile model that I find most useful about Live’s Drum Rack. So these new retro kits will be small and interchangable. Want a 909 kick in your DR55? Just drag and drop it. Want to switch out the whole kit on the fly? Just select a different preset.

So whether or not the kits are translatable to Battery is an unknown at this point, which could certainly affect the saleability of the set. But Live users will love them.  Also, the whole thing doesn’t necessarily follow the whole Beatserv mission of new creativity, although the added features in each kit are pretty slick. Perhaps we’ll have an addition to the Beatserv free series? Well, it’s a lot of work, so we’ll see.