I had a quick question about Olav's tutorial. In the tutorial he uses a drum rack then uses separate MIDI tracks to send MIDI data to the pads in the drum rack. If you are going to have separate tracks for each drum instrument/sample wouldn't it save some screen space and be a little easier to mix if you just forgot the drum rack all together and just made a MIDI track for each drum hit with a simpler on it? Then you could control the volume levels for each drum in the Arrangement view as well as the Session view. You also would save time because you wouldn't have to route each track, and could just group all the simplers together. Hope that made sense.

My sentiments exactly.

Drum racks are great because there are so many ways to use them, and it all depends on your particular workflow and performance style on stage. His method is best for one of two reasons, and honestly he doesn't really mention or show why he does it that way. First, many people spend a lot of time and effort stuffing drum racks full of particular percussion sounds that work well together. One drum rack might be good for minimal, while another is good for house, et cetera. In other words, most folks don't build a kit from scratch like he's doing here. Most of the time it's all ready to go. Just need to add midi information and tweak some sounds here and there and you're off and running. Activating the rack by using separate midi tracks helps keep things nicely organized so that if a slight change is made to a pattern, it doesn't require one midi clip on one track that is full of 128 clips. It'd be hard to keep track of which clip to play in that case! So, if he wants to drop the snare and hat for whatever reason, he just has to put a dummy clip in, mute the track, whatever... It is already on it's own track feeding the rack, so there's no need to mess with one midi clip that has the entire kit being activated through it. If the clips are kept separate, it essentially adds more control to improvising drops, fills, transitions, and so on. Jamie