I've spent the last 4 hours of the evening chopping up drums tracks for several songs in Ableton Live. It's monotonous work, but essential for control over the individual drum sounds. I separate rhythm tracks at the recording or bounce stage whenever possible, but sometimes, because of the way I've applied effects or because of the original method of generation, it's time to slice.

I have developed what I think is probably the quickest way of slicing with the most amount of discretionary control:

• I place my source rhythm track (rebeat) above the tracks the individual hits of type will be dropped into (rekick, resnare, rehat, reblock). I then loop bar by bar as I edit.
• Soloing the source channel, I slice up the source as the selection loops, starting at the left and working to the right.
• As I slice, I drag and drop the individual hits to their non-soloed tracks beneath the source. This creates a silence at the head of the source material I'm editing, and lets me hear on the next loop through whether I missed the tail of a hit or got part of the next drum sound.
• After I've sliced and moved all the source material to its appropriate individual tracks, I solo out each track, listening to the placed material. This lets me hear the isolated edits alone and identify any mistakes or misplacements I may have made.
• If all tracks are solid, I unsolo all and make sure the bar's timing is still proper. Working fast, a dragged hit may bump itself unnoticed to the next time marker in the grid. This step lets me find these problems.
• On to the next bar.