Hey everyone! I am new to Ableset and am trying to set up a “pad player” of sorts. I have all my pads loaded into a drum rack in Classic mode looping. I can’t figure out the OSC commands to send to each specific note in my drum rack. Any ideas that could help me out??
Hey @colincarny, welcome to the forum!
The way to do this is by using Canvas buttons that send MIDI notes back into Ableton, where your drum rack picks them up. AbleSet doesn’t send OSC directly to individual drum rack pads — instead, you route MIDI through a virtual MIDI port.
Here’s the general idea:
1. Set up a virtual MIDI port
- On Mac: use the IAC Driver (built into Audio MIDI Setup)
- On Windows: use something like loopMIDI
2. Set your drum rack track’s MIDI input to that virtual port
In Ableton, set the MIDI From on your drum rack track to the virtual MIDI port so it receives the notes AbleSet sends.
3. Create Canvas buttons that send MIDI notes
Add a Button element to your Canvas, set the type to Script, and use sendMidiNote() in the On Press script. Each button targets a different note in your drum rack:
// Example: trigger pad on C1 (MIDI note 36)
sendMidiNote("IAC Driver Bus 1", 1, 36, 127, 100);
The parameters are: MIDI output name, channel, note number, velocity, and duration in ms. Change the note number for each pad (36, 37, 38, etc. — matching whatever notes your drum rack cells are mapped to).
You can also use sendOsc("/midi/send/note", ...) which does the same thing:
sendOsc("/midi/send/note", "IAC Driver Bus 1", 1, 36, 127, 100);
You can also see this in action in the official Canvas tutorial — the script button example triggers an airhorn sample via MIDI
Let me know if that works for your use case.