True to the Ableton philosophy, Operator invites creativity through a fusion of depth and usability, allowing even the most complex sounds to be created quickly. Whether you long for evolving synthetic textures, rich expressive leads, gritty percussion, rhythmic atmospheres or anything in between, Operator has the cure. DM ARP 2600 Drums is a free Live Pack consisting of 8 Ableton Drum Racks and 150 original analog percussion sounds sampled from Daniel Miller's own ARP 2600 modular synthesizer. Extensive controls for real-time sound tweaking and bonus sequence clips are included.
Best Free Ableton Packs
Here's seven excellent Ableton Packs I use myself. There are a ton of great resources out there for Ableton, from rack and sample bundles to crazy Max for Live tools. We've organised these into 2 sections…. general packs (under Best Free Ableton Packs) and percussion based (under Best Free Drum Ableton Packs). We'll kick off with the almighty Creative Extensions……
Creative Extensions by Ableton
Get it here: https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/creative-extensions/
Made by Ableton themselves in conjunction with Max For Live developer Amazing Noises. The instruments and effects it contains are great and could have been bundled with Live as proper standalone units as to be honest…
It has two instruments… ‘Bass' – a monophonic low-end beast, and ‘Poli' a polyphonic synth for designing lush chords that has some really nice features like ring mod and xmod (ala Jupiter-8).
It has a step sequencer called ‘Melodic Steps' which has the ability to get mental really quickly with the ability to run different length sequences at various scales. With ability to sequence Octave, Transpose, Length, velocity and Chance (all with the ability to run at different sequence lengths for those infinitely changing modular' sequencers).
The effects are immense… Pitch Hack (for tight pitch delay style effects), Gated Delay (beat-repeat style delay), Color Limiter (hardware mimicking limiter with saturation), Re-Enveloper (multiband envelope processor), and Spectral Blur (grainy reverb textures). Office 2019 for mac free download. Getting this pack feels like by Abelton doubled in size and I can see myself using some of these in every track we make.
Granulator II by Robert Henke (Monolake)
Get it here: https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/granulator-ii/
This has gained a lot of fame and rightly so, the tool is amazing for textures/drones and pads – made by the excellent Robert Henke (Monolake). It acts a bit like a sampler, but it plays back small grains of sound from a loop of the sample in an unconventional order and time. These times and orders can be tweaked to make a new evolving sound. Watch Robert explain more about it here, then download it and load up a sample….
The Forge
Get it here: https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/forge/
Some great glitchy samples and fx by IDM producer Hecq. Includes samples, construction kits, plus some custom Max for Live audio effects inducing rhythmic delays. Ideal for IDM and industrial percussion programming and processing.
Stray Cats Collection
Get it here: https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/stray-cats-collection/
Max for Cats and Sonic Bloom give away a great pack of Max For Live devices, including an 8 step sequencer, 2 instruments (with tons of presets), a chord step sequencer and some great audio effects including rhythmic and glitching delays and reverbs as well as ‘Color' for adding analogue noise, warmth and error to the signal chain.
Best Free Ableton Drum Packs
Krikor Kouchian: Free LinnDrums for Live
Get it here: https://cdn-resources.ableton.com/resources/cf/b7/cfb7c3db-fd3a-4589-ad79-86928503a25d/pacific_alley_linndrum_project.zip
Producer extraordinaire Krikor, he's put out some dope bangers on Long Island Electrical Systems. His Linn Drum pack here is no ordinary pack – he recorded the samples on the internal memory (eproms) of a digital Casio Rz-1 drum machine, which adds some amazing down-sampling crunch to the samples. The Rack also comes with his take on Princes style drum saturation with the Purpleizer! All in all a brilliant drum tool.
We wrote about this in our Best Free Drum Machine Samples article.
Daniel Miller's ARP 2600 Drums
Get it here: https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/dm-arp-2600-drums/
Here's a collection of drum racks sampled from legendary producer Daniel Miller's semi modular dream synth. Impressive and unique percussion samples from one of my favourite synths.
Drum Machines by Ableton
Get it here: https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/drum-machines/
A big pack of drums as the title suggests! Download microsoft remote desktop 8 mac. It contains multiple Roland 606,707,808, 909, samples processed and programmed plus some other great samples/construction kits. Comes with a lot of ‘.alc' file clips – you load them and the samples load with a pre-programmed beat and fx rack so there's a loop is set up and ready to go as great starting point. This is our go-to pack for a fresh take on classic drum sounds.
Designer Drums by Ableton
Get it here: https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/designer-drums/
Install virtualbox on macos. Some really nice glitchy IDM / minimal house / glitch-hop style drum kits and samples. Plus some ‘.alc' clip files so you can load up some pre-programmed beats with instruments and rack effects all ready to go. Perfect for digital weird drum sounds.
Summary
There you have it, some of the best free packs for your library that are highly use-sable. ‘Drum Machines' is probably my most used pack to be honest. Please let us know anymore you recommend and we'll update this article.
We've also done a rundown of the best free vsts that we use.
Ableton Lite
Follow us for updates…. https://www.instagram.com/studiobrootle/
