The Drums Tab

Drums from a separate musical brain: how a beat is put together, what the kit lanes show, and the three bundled kits you hear when you press Play.

DocumentationDrums
Drums

Drums

The Drums Tab

Drums live on their own tab, with their own chat, their own controls and their own clip. It is a separate musical brain from the Melodic tab, not the same one asked for a beat: the two never see each other's output, and switching between them keeps both, including undo history.

The drum module is a beta

It ships working and it will keep changing. Expect rough edges, and expect the tab to improve release by release. The Melodic tab is unaffected by this and is not in beta.

This page covers the tab itself: how a beat is put together, what the lanes show, and what you hear on Play. Writing a Beat covers the styles and controls that shape a generation, Drum Maps covers which note each piece lands on and how to teach Aether your own rack, and Exporting Beats covers getting the result into your DAW.

Aether assigns the pitches, not the AI

The model never picks a note number. It names pieces, kick, snare, closed_hat, and Aether maps each one to a pitch from the MIDI map. That is what makes a beat land correctly: drop it on an Ableton Drum Rack and the kick is on the kick pad without touching anything.

It is also why the legend can never be wrong. The table in the reply is printed from the same lookup that wrote the MIDI, so the two cannot disagree.

Everything exports on channel 10

Channel 10 is the General MIDI percussion channel, and every drum export is pinned to it, including the copy saved to your Library. Melodic layers are never assigned channel 10 automatically, so a bass line cannot land there and play back as drums. You can still route a melodic layer to 10 deliberately.

Kit lanes

Drums use lanes rather than a piano roll: one row per piece, kick at the bottom, each labelled with its name and the note number it was given. Hits are pills that start on the beat they land on, with velocity as opacity, so turning Ghost depth down visibly recedes the quiet hats while the accents hold. Solo and mute sit in the lane itself.

At 100 percent the grid shows four bars. Zoom with the plus and minus buttons or Ctrl-scroll, pan with Shift-scroll or by dragging the grid, and the ruler numbers every beat once there is room, 1.1 through 1.4, rather than only the bars.

Each lane's gutter carries the piece name, a badge with its note number, and S and M for solo and mute. They are always drawn rather than appearing on hover: a lane is a mixer strip before it is a label, and a control you cannot see is one you do not know you have. Hovering the row names the piece, its note and the octave that note falls in under your chosen naming convention.

Hearing your beat

Press Play and the beat sounds through a real drum kit. Three ship with the plugin, chosen from the Sound control on the top bar:

  • ●Live Kit, an acoustic kit recorded in a room. The default.
  • ●Electronic Kit, analogue drum machine sounds.
  • ●Hip Hop Kit, sampled one-shots.

Switching between them changes what you hear and nothing else. It moves no notes, touches no MIDI map, and does not change what you drag out. The three are level matched against each other and sit slightly forward of the Melodic tab's piano, so changing kit changes the sound rather than the volume.

Your choice of Sound is a preference on your machine rather than part of the project. It is remembered between sessions, and a project opened on another machine previews on whatever that machine has selected.

Why the preview plays the right drum on any pad layout

A beat's note numbers are positions on your rack, not pitches. If your map puts the kick on 60, the file has to say 60, but note 60 in Aether's own kit is a different drum. So Aether translates: it reads the map that assigned the pitches and sounds its own kick for your kick. The export is untouched and still says 60. A note your map does not name is left silent rather than sounding an unrelated drum.

If you route the preview to an external MIDI device instead, none of this applies and none of it needs to: those notes reach your own rack, which is what they were written for. That path is unchanged.