M-Audio Axiom 25 And Ableton Live: Can't We All Just Get Along?
It's a shame when two parties who are so obviously meant for each other just can't seem to get along. Such is sometimes the case with the M-Audio Axiom 25 and Ableton Live 7, but fear not: Dr. Holland, registered MIDI counselor, isn't here to point the finger. He's here to help Axiom and Ableton forward, together, towards a fulfilled life of grimy drum n' bass.
BILL HOLLAND: Welcome back to Gearwire.Com. My name is Bill Holland, and I’m looking at the Axiom 25 from M-Audio. The reason we are looking at the Axiom 25 is last week a friend approached me and said she was having trouble getting the Axiom to sync up within Ableton. Nothing was auto-mapping correctly. You’ll notice my knobs are not defaulting to any control although you will see a little bit of MIDI activity here when I move them. So, what I’m going to do is walk you through how to rescue your M-Audio Axiom 25 in an emergency situation and how to set up if you can’t get the auto-mapping to work.
So, let’s go up to our options menu. Go to edit MIDI map, and first we’re going to set our transport controls, so I’m going to select play, hit play here, stop button, hit stop, and hit record here. You’ll notice over here the corresponding CC control pops up where I have assigned the MIDI controller. Then I’m going to assign my loop which will have your loop over here. Here we have loop on/off, and I’m going to grab my knobs and for my Boombastic Bass, I’m going to assign a control for drive, cutoff, and resonance. I don’t really want to assign any of these other ones, maybe tail, but let’s put the tail over here at the end of my controls.
So, let’s move on to the pad controls. You’ll see my drum rack right here, and you’ll notice that these keys default...
[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING DRUM SAMPLES USING DRUM PADS ON THE M-AUDIO AXIOM 25]
to C1, D1, and then it jumps to A-sharp-1, F-sharp-1, D2, A1, and so forth.
[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING DRUM SAMPLES USING DRUM PADS ON THE M-AUDIO AXIOM 25]
So, you want to assign your bass drum sounds to where these pads are actually placed at. So, if I go and get like a hi-hat...,
[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING HI-HAT SAMPLES USING DRUM PADS ON THE M-AUDIO AXIOM 25]
...no. That’s not where they are. See?
[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING HI-HAT SAMPLES USING DRUM PADS ON THE M-AUDIO AXIOM 25]
But that’s right, so I can drag this over here and now...
[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING DRUM SAMPLES USING DRUM PADS ON THE M-AUDIO AXIOM 25]
...now that all syncs up. So, I have --
[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING HI-HAT SAMPLES USING DRUM PADS ON THE M-AUDIO AXIOM 25]
Now, I can record a quick drum line.
[BILL HOLLAND RECORDING A MIDI DRUM SEQUENCE USING DRUM PADS ON THE M-AUDIO AXIOM 25]
And if that’s a little bit off, in fact I have a feeling it really was, since you started at two and it’s a little bit over there, I can move everything back simply by quantizing all this. If go to quantize, I’m going to quantize it within the nearest 16th note. Now it should be right.
[BILL HOLLAND PLAYING BACK QUANTIZED DRUM TRACK ON ABLETON LIVE]
So, the next really cool thing that we can do with this is actually go through our plugins that come with Ableton, now that we have the control surface set up, and we can play around with how to use these to get a variety of effects. We have the Beat Repeater, for example. Let’s see what happens if I put that on the bass...
[BILL HOLLAND USING THE M-AUDIO AXIOM 25 TO CONTROL EFFECTS ON ABLETON LIVE]
...and have it control different parameters.
[BILL HOLLAND USING THE M-AUDIO AXIOM 25 TO CONTROL EFFECTS ON ABLETON LIVE]
Now, I’ve shown you how to set this up when you’re in an emergency situation and the auto-mapping isn’t working. Let’s take a look at some quick things we can do using the built-in effects in Ableton.
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