This is an Ableton tutorial that comes in handy if you don’t have a MIDI controller; you can use your computer keyboard to tap in your percussion samples instead. Also, you can even assign which specific pads in the drum rack get triggered from specific keys on your keyboard.

Load up a drum track in a MIDI channel, and load up the samples you want to use in the rack. Click on a specific pad to highlight it, and while holding the specific key you want to use on the keyboard to trigger that sample, drag it over to the small strip at the right of the drum rack’s window and drop it on any one of the 128 tiny squares. You have now assigned a specific sample to a specific position on that strip, which is triggered by a specific key. See the first video if this doesn’t make sense.

There are also several shortcut keys you can use as well, directly from the keyboard (see the second video):

Z key transposes the sample down a single octave
X key transposes the sample up a single octave
C key brings the overall volume of your drum rack down a small increment
V key brings the overall volume of your drum rack up a small increment

Be sure to check out more of innerstatejt’s videos here, he has plenty of great tutorials for Ableton Live.