Ableton Live Racks EXPLAINED!

hey friends Matt AKA Martin here welcome back and today I'm going to be demystifying racks in Ableton Live breaking down the basics and helping you understand everything there is to know so you can get started using them before we get started if you really enjoy my content make sure to head on over to my buy me a coffee page where you can support me by buying me a coffee I've got a bunch of free downloads over there so heading over there and get some cool stuff so first up what is a rack a rack is a device that collects multiple devices and or plugins into a single device allowing you to control multiple aspects of those devices in various ways effectively turning that collection of devices into a single coherent device Ableton Live has four main types of racks there are audio effect racks which take in an audio signal and output an audio signal and can only contain audio effects there are midi effect racks which can take in a midi signal and output a midi signal and can only contain midi effect devices there are instrument racks which take in a midi signal and output an audio signal and can contain midi effects devices and audio effects and there are drum racks but drum racks are going to be something that we're going to cover in a different video and today we're going to focus on audio effect racks midi effect racks and instrument racks so let's start by taking a look at the basics of an audio effect rack which is arguably the most simple type of rack and looking at how we can build one up from scratch okay so here we are in Ableton Live and I have a break sample loaded up on an audio track that sounds like this [Music] and I've also got loaded up on this audio track an audio effect rack that contains multiple audio effects inside of it that really changes the sound of this break so let me engage this audio effect rack and now take a listen to the break foreign so inside that audio effect rack there are multiple audio effects that are all working together to change this sound into something completely different okay so I'm going to delete this audio effect rack I'm going to start and create an audio effect rack from scratch now there are a few different ways that we can do this the first way is to go to our audio effects inside of our browser go to our utilities folder and come down to audio effect rack and if I load that up onto our audio track that will create a blank audio effect rack for us the other way to do it is to load up any audio effect I'm going to load up an auto filter in this particular instance and now I can simply right click on this Auto filter and click on group and that will group the selected audio effect in this case an auto filter inside of an audio effect rack if you right click a midi effect and group it it will group it to a midi effect rack and if you right click an instrument and group it it will group it to an instrument rack so now I have this break running through an auto filter and I can control this audio filter like I normally would I'm going to change this to a high pass filter and I'm going to turn the cutoff frequency all the way down now as you heard before we can actually have multiple audio effects contained within a single audio effect rack so we're going to do this now by adding another audio effect in the form of a Reverb so I'm going to grab a Reverb from our audio effects click and drag and place it after the auto filter but just before this little kind of line right here that signifies the end of the group so now I have an auto filter followed by a Reverb both contained within this audio effect rack I can change some settings here so maybe increase the cutoff frequency of the auto filter increase the resonance a little bit and increase the Decay and dry weight of the Reverb so now we get a sound that sounds like this [Music] and now because both of these audio effects are contained within a single audio effect rack I get the ability to turn on or off both of these by turning on or off the audio effect rack itself and we can see that device activator just here [Music] foreign of a single button I can turn on or off both of these audio effects now inside of a single audio effect rack you can have effectively unlimited effects you're not just limited to two but we're going to keep working with two for this example so now that I have both of these two audio effects contained with inside a single audio effect rack I want to show you one of the best things about Ableton Live racks and these are macro controls when we have devices inside of a rack we can actually map one or more parameters of each of those devices to a macro knob which we can then easily access from the front panel of the audio effect rack I'm going to show the macro controls of this audio effect rack that we've created by going to the little top icon on the left which is the show and hide macro controls icon click this and you'll notice all of these eight macro controls show up here I can map any parameter on any of these effects to any of these eight macros inside of the audio effect rack and in fact I can actually have up to 16 macros inside of an audio effect rack and all I need to do to map a parameter is simply right click on that parameter in this case I'll right click on the filter cutoff frequency of the auto filter and map it to a macro I'm going to choose macro one and now I get control over the cutoff frequency of this Auto filter with macro 1 right here [Music] I could also map another parameter say the dry wet of the Reverb to maybe macro 2. so I can right click that and map that to macro 2. and this is just one way of mapping parameters we can also map parameters by clicking on the little map button up the top of the audio effects rack and when we click on this we get this map button down below each of these macro knobs right here and I can click on any of the green highlighted parameters such as the resonance and map that to any of the macro controls that are showing up here note that we can also map multiple parameters to the same macro as an example I can also map the resonance control of the auto filter to macro 1 which is already controlling the filter frequency all I need to do that is click on the resonance control of the auto filter and click on the map button for macro 1. and now as I move macro 1 you'll notice that I move both the filter cutoff frequency as well as the filter resonance but currently when I do this the resonance is going really really high and that's where the other aspect of this macro mapping view comes into it you'll notice that when I click on this map mode view switch our browser view switches from our normal browser to a macro mapping View and in here I get the ability to assign the range within which that macro controls a linked parameter so I can go up to this section where it says macro 1 Auto filter resonance and I can change the Min and Max values to something a little bit more appropriate so maybe I can go a minimum of 10 to a maximum of 60 and now when I change the position of macro 1 you'll notice that the position of the resonance control is constrained to that particular range [Music] foreign [Music] ER we also get the ability to invert the range of the selected parameter for example if I wanted the resonance to actually decrease as I increased the control I could right click on this macro 1 Auto filter resonance mapping and click invert range and now as I increase macro 1 we're going from a higher resonance to a lower resonance [Music] I'm going to undo that so we're still going from low to high instead of from high to low let's close up this mapping window and we can also actually change these macros in a way that makes them more user friendly for example instead of macro one just being called macro 1 I can right click it and I can rename it and maybe call it something like filter and instead of this dry wet control for the Reverb being called dry wet I can right click it and maybe call it something like Reverb I can also color code these macros by right clicking and selecting a color maybe a filter can be blue and our Reverb can be purple and as I mentioned before we can also have up to 16 macros visible and this is done by clicking on these little plus icon right here which goes all the way up to showing 16 macros or I can click on the minus icon and I can show all the way down to only a single macro control for the moment how about we leave this showing eight macro controls again and turn our attention to the other really cool things about macros which is the randomization and variation controls so you'll notice up the top of the audio effect rack there is this little button that says Rand which is short for randomize if I click this this will actually randomize the value of each of the different mapped macros so notice when I click this our filter and Reverb controls are now assigned to a random position [Music] this is a really great way to quickly generate cool creative ideas we can also store preset positions of these different macros as what are called macro variations in order to do this all I need to do is go down to this little camera icon here which is the show hide macro variations icon set my parameters to a value that I like maybe I set that filter there and the Reverb up to 47 click on the new button and now that will store those parameters as a variation I can rename that variation by right clicking and clicking rename filtered verb and if I want to I can also store a new variation by again moving these parameters all the way down maybe the filter and Reverb both at zero clicking new and I can now right click rename this and call this dry and so now when I click on filtered verb the positioning of those macros changes and when I click on dry the positioning of those macros changes and this allows really quick and easy access to a preset selection of parameters another really great feature of racks inside of Ableton Live is the ability to have multiple signal paths or chains inside of a single rack to show this I'm going to go down to the last little icon here which is the show hide chain list icon when I click this it's going to show this middle view here which is our chain list and we can see here that currently we have a single chain this chain contains both our Auto filter and our Reverb devices we can create an additional chain in two different ways I can either click and drag an audio effect into this chain list as it says here so I might for instance click and drag a delay into this chain list and that will add a delay as a new chain or I can right click in this blank space and just click create chain and that will create a blank chain with no audio effects or devices loaded up inside of it I'm going to delete this blank chain just by clicking it and pressing the delete key and we're going to work with the delay chain now first things first I can rename and recolor these chains as I want so I might go to this first chain right click rename it and call it filter verb and I might go to this second chain right click rename it and call it delay I can also as I mentioned color code these so I might color code the filtered verb as blue and the delay as green now currently what's happening is the signal is being fed into this audio effect rack and then effectively two copies of this signal are being created one is being sent to the filter verb and one is being sent to the delay if I play this you'll hear what I mean foreign we get independent mixer controls I get the ability to control the volume of each chain so I could turn down the delay I can Pan the chain either to the left or the right and I can mute and solo a chain as well as an example if I solo the filter verb chain we're just going to hear the output of this Auto filter and the Reverb and if I solo the delay chain we're just going to hear the output of the delay chain foreign I can also map any parameter of any device in any chain to any of the macro controls on my audio effect rack using chains in this way is a really great way to perform parallel processing and if you don't know what parallel processing is I recently did a video on it which you can check out via the card above but chains and racks also allow for really cool creative and useful possibilities using the chain selector if I go up to the top of the chain list you'll see this button that says chain and if I click on this you will see a new view open up which is the chain or Zone editor and in this Zone editor you'll see that we have a little blue bar beside each of our chains right here and not only that we also have this little blue bar on a ruler up the top of this chain or Zone editor using a combination of the little blue bars beside each chain as well as the blue selector we can actually change which chain is processing audio at any given time as an example I could go down to this delay bar right here then when my cursor turns into this bar with an arrow either side I can click and drag this and move this to chain one instead of chain zero and now when I play our signal it's only passing through the filter verb chain I can now go up to this chain selector right here click and drag it so it's selecting chain one and now our signal is only being processed through our delay chain we can also have our rack automatically select which chain is processing audio for us by using this little arrow button up the top here which is the auto select button if I engage this you'll now notice that when we switch between our delay and our filter verb being selected by this chain selector the selected chain changes based on which of the chains is currently processing the signal foreign ly also fade between different chains so instead of having a chain just restricted to a single chain number we can have a chain distributed across all of the possible 127 different zones and I'm going to do this for both of our chains Now using this tiny little light blue bar at the top of each of these bars that I just dragged out I can click and drag to the left or right to create a fade for that chain and I'm going to have our filter verb faded all the way to the left and our delay faded all the way to the right and now as I move my chain selector through these 128 possible different values we get to fade effectively between these two different chains [Music] and yes of course I can also map this chain selector to a macro all I need to do to do that is simply right click on the Chain selector and map it to a macro we can map it to macro three now you'll see that macro number three is assigned to our chain selector I can right click this give it a different color maybe pink and now as I move this macro you'll notice the chain selector changes foreign there are also a few other features inside of the Zone editor for example you can right click and change the size of the Zone editor between either small medium or large and you can also distribute the Zone ranges of each of the different chains equally across the entirety of the available zones by right-clicking and going distribute ranges equally and so that's pretty much everything there is to know about audio effect tracks but what about midi and instrument racks by the way if you're enjoying this video so far and finding it useful please consider leaving a like down below subscribing if you're new if you haven't already and if you really enjoy it head on over to my buy me a coffee page where you can support me by buying me a coffee it really does help me out and it makes sure that you get to see my videos more often so midi effect racks and instrument racks function ineffectively the exact same way as audio effect racks except that of course midi effect racks can only contain midi effects and instrument racks can contain midi effects instruments and audio effects in this example here I've got a wavetable device loaded up on a midi track and I'm sending it a single midi note I've got a midi effect rack loaded up here which contains multiple midi effects and if I engage this we'll hear that it changes the sound completely we can open up the midi effect rack here by clicking on the show hide devices option and we can see that we actually have two different chains here each with midi effects so our midi effect racks take in MIDI data process that midi data and then output midi data here I've got an example of an instrument rack this instrument rack if I open it up we can see contains an instrument in the form of a wavetable device followed by a series of audio effects all of which have parameters controlled by these different macro controls right here now of course if we wanted to we could also have a midi effect contained inside of this instrument rack but we don't currently however aside from the different types of devices that you can put in each rack there is also one massive difference that sets midi effect racks and instrument racks apart from audio effect racks and this is the ability to select chains based not only on the Chain selector but also by incoming midi Note data as an example here I've got that same wavetable device from before in order to group this to an instrument rack I can right click on the device title bar and click on group now what I'm going to do is open up the chain list by clicking on the show hide chain list button and you'll see here that inside of the instrument rack we have two more different buttons on the top of our chain list selector we have key and Vel as well as chain and hide the chain selector functions in exactly the same way that it does inside of an audio effect rack however the key and velocity Zone editors allow us to select which chain is playing based on the incoming midi note and the velocity of the incoming midi note so what I'm going to do is add Ableton Live's operator device to this instrument rack as a new chain I'm going to hide the devices because we don't need to see them and now if I press a note you'll see that we hear both the wave table and the operator devices at the same time to show this more accurately I can solo The Wave table and I can install the operator and those around two different sounds grouped inside of this instrument rack however using this key Zone editor right here I can make it so that only a certain range of midi notes gets sent to the wave table and a certain range of midi notes gets sent to the operator device as an example let's make it so that anything below C3 gets sent to the wave table and anything above C3 gets sent to the operator so now when I play a note that's below C3 we hear the wavetable device and if I play a note that's above the C3 we hear the operator if I reset this we can now go to our velocity Zone editor and make it so that only higher velocities trigger the wavetable instrument to play and at lower velocities trigger the operator instrument to play so now when I trigger a higher velocity we hear the wavetable device and if I trigger a lower velocity we hear the operator device and we can use key zones velocity zones and chain zones altogether in tandem to create a really complicated instrument Rack or midi effect rack as another thing to note if you have an instrument rack loaded up on a track you'll also see that when you're in session view that track shows up with a little arrow icon on its track header which allows you to unfold and see each of the different instruments contained within that instrument rack on that particular track for all these reasons listening to this video I think that racks are one of the best features inside of Ableton Live they allow for really cool creative sound design possibilities they can speed up workflows significantly and they're really useful in live performance contexts now there are a few more features that racks offer you that are a little bit outside of the scope of this video but for the most part this covers absolutely everything you need to know about racks I hope this video was useful if you'd like to check out how you can use an instrument rack to create a synth with effectively unlimited voices check out this video right here otherwise please drop a like and a comment down below subscribe if you're new if you really enjoyed the video consider heading on over to my buy me a coffee page where you can support me by buying me a coffee but otherwise thank you for watching and I'll see you all in the next video

Channel: Martiln

Views: 19,927

Keywords: ableton live tutorial, music production tutorial, electronic music production, edm tutorial, ableton certified trainer, ableton tutorial, ableton racks, ableton racks tutorial, ableton live racks, ableton instrument rack, ableton effect rack tutorial, ableton effects rack, audio effect rack ableton, audio effect rack ableton 11, midi effect rack ableton, ableton live instrument, ableton live instrument rack, ableton racks explained

Id: F9dSi23XE5g

Length: 19min 13sec (1153 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 17 2022