Ableton’s Drift synth continues to earn some love, especially as it’s included in all versions of Live 11. Sonic Bloom has a 64 preset pack for this one, plus a free 10 preset pack – and continues to release new Live Themes, too.
Madeleine from Sonic Bloom writes to share this one. Drift’s beautiful, simple style may mean some of the time you’ll dial in sounds even without presets, but these starting points give you complete Racks with bass, leads, pads, and experimental sounds, perfect for understanding everything Drift can do.
There’s also a lot of work here that make this ready to play on any MPE or other MIDI controller, unlocking other timbral possibilities with aftertouch pressure and slide or moving the mod wheel of your keyboard.
And what’s great here is, you have lots of exquisitely mapped Racks that combine Drift with other effects. On any controller – Push, APC, etc. – that also means tons of tweakable parameters. It’s worth a download of at least the free pack even just to see how to do preset design right. Really inspiring stuff.
EUR 19.99 for the paid version. You’ll need Live 11.3 Standard or greater for this one – 11.3 for Drift, and the Standard edition as this makes use of additional Devices outside of Lite.
And of course you should go check out our exclusive deep dive with Drift’s creator for more background on this instrument and ideas on how to get the most out of it:
By the way, speaking of cool things to download from the Sonic Bloom site, they’ve continued their free Ableton Live Themes series. I am particularly a fan of set #23, but #24 also has some daring new options. And crucially, these themes will always have enough contrast and nothing gets lost / invisible, which is not actually all that easy to pull off. There’s no question these are the most reliable themes out there, rivaling (or arguably even exceeding) what you get from Ableton themselves.
Free Ableton Live Themes Set #23 for Live 11
Free Ableton Live Themes Set #24 for Live 11