Using Chain Selector with Instrument Racks

hey guys welcome back in this lesson we are going to look at a slightly more advanced way to play back your midi clips through different instruments using instrument racks and ableton live so what do i mean well in our last lesson we created several tracks with different drum racks in them so that we could sample our midi clips and see how they sounded in different drum racks this way we're going to do a little bit differently we're going to have one track and i've labeled it drum racks and inside of this drum rack we're going to have what's called an instrument rack and the instrument rack is going to be loaded with dozens of different drum racks okay so what i'm going to do is sample through these so you can see how this might be useful and have you just look at this um these blue dashes over here and this little green dot and i'm going to use this chain selector to change the position of this green dot from left to right and you'll hear the drum racks are changing over time so i'm just going to play a little sample so you can hear how this sounds and then i'll explain how i did it let's turn the space down before i go so you can hear the drums okay so here we go now we're on the 707 core kit now we're in the 808 909 watch the chain selector alert battery [Music] i think you get the point and i have about 25 or so different drum sounds in here drum rocks and i can very quickly cycle through them all [Music] all right and you can put as many as your cp you can handle in one instrument rack okay so what's going on here well instrument rack lives up here under the instruments folder and all you have to do is drag and drop a blank instrument rack into your set give it a second to load and this is what it looks like it is an empty bucket with empty macros and it says drop an instrument sample here all right i'll show you how to do this in just a second so inside this instrument rack i've loaded individual kits so if you look at the top one 606 and come over here you can see the actual drum rack lives inside the instrument rack it has all of its sounds pads loaded up with the sampler the simpler and the eight macros are mapped now you could also start to add effects into these instrument racks as well and really really build them out so if i click on the second one you can see this is the 707 808 909 etc etc when i turn the chain selector the chain selector dial moves from left to right indicating which element on the chain we want to activate so 606 is on zero 707 is on one 808 is on two 909 is on three alert is on four et cetera et cetera okay how did i set this up it's pretty easy actually let's go ahead and do it so that you can see i'm going to go ahead and select let's see let's go to um i'll just grab an abyss kit drag it and drop it this can take well to load if you have a lot of samples in them and this board okay let's add both of these in here now we have two drum kits eventually that are going to be loaded into the same instrument rack if you could guess you probably guess that if i play a note it's going to hit both instrument racks or both drum racks at the same time so the kick for the abyss is triggering at the same time as the kick for the borja kit all right that's not what we want we only want one at a time so we have to select chain and here's where we tell the chain selector which instrument to play all right so this first one is on zero cool the second one is also n zero let's just slide that over to one using the mouse all right now nothing happens if i turn this macro dial right well we want this macro dial to control the chain selector so let's click on map and let's touch this chain selector with our mouse and click on it and then click map all right so now the chain selector is this dial turn off the mapping function and now when you move your dial up it should move that chain selector pretty cool right so you have started to build your own chain cool let's turn this track off for now i want to show you that i also did this with my base racks in track two i have several base instruments stacked on top of each other which is going to allow me to cycle through my bass sounds and sample them with these different midi clips here [Music] [Music] cool so as you can imagine you could do this for any instrument right and in fact i've done it with my synth instruments as well call me crazy [Music] so all right that one didn't go quite as well as planned but you get the idea so my drum rack contains this track here contains an instrument rack that is full of drum racks my bass rack track is an instrument rack that is full of bass instruments and my melodic synth track here is an instrument rack full of different synthesizers okay this can be kind of a fun way to mix and match your different sounds in your set and allow you to manipulate the sounds without having to do too much extra work now if you have a midi controller you can hit command m to go into your midi map mode and then tell your midi controller to turn this dial so that you can actually use a dial instead of your mouse to change to turn these sounds and that can be kind of fun because you can just play it back and then actually turn the dials so we will cover that in a later lesson just know that that is an option and have fun go build an instrument rack with a bunch of instruments in it and map your chain selector to change those sounds you can create some awesome personal instrument racks that are maybe your sound pilot for future projects you

Channel: Ableton Christina aka Feral Kytty

Views: 8,819

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Id: CsA8WnnG6W8

Length: 7min 34sec (454 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021