Hi,
Does anyone have experience with reprogramming existing drums (so drums created in a DAW for example) into the AR?
I want to play some of our existing tracks in a DAWless setup. Our drums are mostly sample based with some additional stuff done by the AR, with heavy layering and complex patterns/changes throughout.
Anyone who did something similar before and has some best practices?
If using a DAW like Ableton it should be possible to convert some loops using audio to midi, then record the midi notes into AR sequencer
It’s not always perfectly identical but can get you close
So I just reprogrammed an existing song into the AR, from the stems I had for that song. For anyone looking to do this, here are some tips (keep in mind, I am a AR beginner):
Single out one-shots from the stems in Ableton. If a stem has variations in the one shots, use sample chains. Put your sample rate to 48k, bitrate to 16 and sound to mono. I know the AR converts anyway but at least you can (i assume) save some space like this (24 br and stereo will result in larger sizes). The max total size of loaded samples per project is 64MB. A oneshot is about 33kb, a 4 second loop is 355kb. So assuming you would only use 4 second loops, that would be 177 samples (the max is 128), which should be enough for a live set of about an hour and 10 songs.
I used Locators (little markers to indicate different sections in a song) in Ableton to help me with patterns. So, divide your track into patterns in Ableton first, then use that as a guide when you reprogram on the AR
Keep the names of your samples/one-shots short, the section of the screen they will show up in is very very tiny and it doesn’t seem to scroll. So if it doesn’t fit, you will have to preview or guess.
This might be an obvious one but it wasn’t to me right away: use trigs for one-shots that are used as fillers and only occur sporadically. Like this you don’t waste a whole voice for something that is only played a few times over the course of your track. Keep in mind that you can’t trigger 2 samples/sounds at the same time using the same trig
I used @Bloop’s tip as well: converted a clean kick loop that was quite complex in terms of pattern into a midi sequence in Ableton, then used the midi pattern as a visual guide to put my triggs on the AR.
I will do a whole liveset like this, so will probably come across more findings along the way. Will share those, even though it might be entry-level stuff for some users 
To speed the process up, you could route the MIDI clips out to the AR MIDI in and use live record mode to capture them in the sequencer
It doesn’t work good for me, I loose my groove