Exporting Reason Drums to Ableton Live

A while back I downloaded a drum kit called the Tape808 from Goldbaby. It was really an exxcellent purchase – I got all those awesome authentic high quality 808 sounds I’ve been needing to beef up my productions (and for only $20!!!). The only thing was, for some reason i decided to get the drums as Reason Refills. This made it really difficult to use the drums for layering in my other program of choice, Albeton Live. Sure, you can Rewire the two programs, but its not quite the same as actually having the individual WAV hits to play with in Impulse or a Drum Rack.

Thats when I thought of this trick for getting the samples into Live quickly:

-Open the desired drum kit in Reason

-Create a drum pattern which uses every drum hit, one at a time, at evenly spaced intervals of 1/4 measure (or 1/2, just long enough for the tails to die off without running into the next hit).

-Export this loop to a WAV file.

-Open said WAV file as an Ableton Live clip

-Right click on the clip and use the “Slice to MIDI” tool to slice at the same intervals the hits were at.

And there you have it- a drum rack created quickly from the Reason drum kit! Enjoy.