Wel­come back, I say to you but most­ly to myself, to a series of posts on how I use Able­ton Live. I start­ed these posts back in 2015, a year where I was a lot more opti­mistic about what I could accom­plish in my free time. A lot has changed since then—Wits, the show I was using as my exam­ple sce­nario, is no more; I’ve exper­i­ment­ed with and evolved my Live work­flow a bit; Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy is col­laps­ing with the elec­tion of a nar­cis­sis­tic tyrant by a gullibl…actually, can we for­get that last one, just for today?

Any­way, where were we? Ah, yes, Live. It turns out that Live is pret­ty apt­ly named; it’s arguably more well-known as a pro­gram­ming tool but it’s also a pow­er­ful and ver­sa­tile source of instru­ment sounds that you can play in real-time.

The Amaz­ing Instru­ment Rack

Among the devices in Live is a col­lec­tion of Instru­ments, which are essen­tial­ly sound sources you load onto MIDI tracks. A typ­i­cal install of Live gives you an array of instru­ments to exper­i­ment with but the hero of our sto­ry and the main top­ic of this post is the Instru­ment Rack:

Live’s Racks are one of its most pow­er­ful tools, and if you haven’t already spent a bit of time in the Ref­er­ence Man­u­al learn­ing about them, I’ll wait while you do so. (I’ll just assume you did that from this point on.)

An Instru­ment Rack, at its heart, is a group of instru­ments and effects. You could bun­dle a organ sound with a super wet reverb into a Rack, call it, say, ​“Super Soak­er Organ,” save it some­where, and it would be avail­able to drag into a MIDI track, with all your set­tings intact, at any time. You can also put an Instru­ment Rack inside anoth­er Instru­ment Rack, and you can put that super bun­dle of racks into anothe rInstru­ment Rack, until your racks all are just straight up Incept­ed through­out your session.

Instru­ment Racks also give you an array of tools to nav­i­gate and con­trol the devices bun­dled with­in the Rack. What you end up with is a com­pact and easy method to store and recall any sounds you might need to play dur­ing a show. Great, right? Not sure yet? Okay, I’ll walk you through an exam­ple of how I put them to use.

The Sound Track

“Hel­lo,” says a band to me in my imag­i­na­tion. ​“We need some­one to play a few key­board sounds. A super-reverb-ed organ on one song, some brass hits on anoth­er, and a sort of rhyth­mic string thing on a third. Can you do it?”

“No prob­lem,” I would say, ignor­ing my lack of key­board abil­i­ty for now. I have Able­ton Live and a con­troller (an Akai MPK 225), so all I need to do is find the right sounds and set up the ses­sion. First on the agen­da is to cre­ate a track in my Live ses­sion to act as a sound bank for my con­troller. I’ll first:

• cre­ate a MIDI track (I’ll title it ​“MPK 225”);
• set the MIDI input to mon­i­tor the MPK, and;
• set the Mon­i­tor mode to ​“In,” which insures I’ll always hear the audio with­out need­ing to put the track into record mode.

Next, I’ll add a sound source so I can hear audio. I’ll browse through Live, find an organ sound and a reverb pre­set, and drag them to the track. For now, I’ll leave the audio rout­ed through the mas­ter bus. Here’s what I have so far:

Final­ly, I’ll select these two Devices and type ⌘-G. (Win­dows users, con­sult your documentation/​incantation.) Voila! It’s an Instru­ment Rack. Let’s expand it and check out the var­i­ous parts con­tained within:

Each Instru­ment Rack has three main sections: 

1. Macros, eight knobs you can use to con­trol Devices with­in the Rack;
2. the Chain List, which con­tains all the groups of devices in the Rack, and;
3. the Device Chain, these devices we’ve grouped togeth­er; in this case, our one chain is the organ through a reverb.

I’ll name this Rack ​“Super Soak­er Organ.” If I give the con­troller a tick­le, I’ll hear the Super Soak­er through the mas­ter bus. Great! But I only have one sound, and I need a few more. What’s next?

The Chain Gang

What I have is an Instru­ment Rack that holds our Super Soak­er. What I want is a Rack that’ll hold more than one sound source, and a way to switch between them. I’ll cre­ate a new Instru­ment Rack and bring Super Soak­er inside — the fastest way to do this is sim­ply select the Super Soak­er rack and hit ⌘-G again:

I’ll name this new Rack ​“MPK Pre­sets,” find the oth­er sounds I need, and add them to the Rack by drag­ging them into the emp­ty area in the Chain List:

Now I have three Device Chains in my Rack. These chains are stored and played in par­al­lel, which is to say the Rack will send MIDI from the MPK through every chain simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. In oth­er words, we’ll hear all instru­ments played at the same time unless we fil­ter the incom­ing mes­sages some­how. We can do this in three ways:

• By Key, which assigns the MIDI note range a Device Chain will accept;
• by Veloc­i­ty, which — you guessed it — states at which veloc­i­ty a Device Chain will accept a signal;
• and, by the Chain Select Ruler, which is a selec­table range of 0 – 127. This is the tool we need.

Click­ing on ​“Chain” will show the ruler. The orange Chain Selec­tor is at zero, and the blue bars that indi­cate each Chain’s zone are also at zero — selec­tor and zones align, so all chains will play a sig­nal from the MPK. Move the selec­tor to any oth­er num­ber in the ruler, and — since no oth­er num­bers are includ­ed in a Chain’s zone — no chains will play. Find­ing a way to eas­i­ly posi­tion this selec­tor is our key to switch­ing between sounds.

Here’s How It Happens

Like most things in Live, the Chain Select Ruler is assign­a­ble via MIDI, and it’s easy to assign it to a knob on the con­troller. ⌘-M, click the Ruler, move our knob, and we’re in busi­ness — twist­ing the knob will now sweep the selec­tor through its range. If we assign wide zones to each Device Chain, like so…

…we’ll have a pret­ty wide range of knob move­ment to select each sound. Turn­ing the knob to left will select the ​“Super Soak­er Organ”; a knob in the mid­dle (some­where between 45 – 80 in this exam­ple) will select ​“Bright Brass”; a knob towards the right will select the ​“Rhyth­mic String Arp.” Easy! And con­ve­nient — if we only have a few sounds to choose from and a free knob.

That’s How It Could Have Happened

Turn­ing a knob to select sounds is easy enough but isn’t the most pre­cise method. But, like most sweep­able con­trols in Live, we can also assign the Chain Select Ruler to a range of MIDI notes. ⌘-M again, click the Ruler, and this time we’ll press, say, the C key on the con­troller, hold it, and then press a C key one octave up. Presto! We’ve assigned an octave of MIDI notes to the Ruler: press­ing C will move the selec­tor to zero, press­ing C# will move it a lit­tle high­er, press­ing D, a lit­tle high­er still.

On our con­troller, we could assign one but­ton a MIDI note of C, the sec­ond C#, the third D, then map this range of notes to the Ruler. It’d look some­thing like this:

Push­ing the first but­ton would select ​“Super Soak­er”; the sec­ond, ​“Bright Brass”; the third, ​“Rhyth­mic String Arp.” The push-but­ton approach, once set up, is almost fool­proof, and con­sid­er­ably more intu­itive than spin­ning a knob and hop­ing for the best.

Up until recent­ly, this was the method I used for chang­ing patch­es on songs (using MIDI clips instead of but­tons to trig­ger the appro­pri­ate notes). But, for my uses, I found it wasn’t super-flex­i­ble if I need­ed to add more songs or move things around. Thank­ful­ly, I found a bet­ter approach.

But Here’s What Real­ly Happened

Turns out there a method to move the chain selec­tor around, with pre­ci­sion, with­out need­ing to map it to any­thing. Enter the clip enve­lope.

Let’s go back to our exam­ple. I’ve got a ​“mas­ter” Instru­ment Rack hold­ing all the pre­sets for my MPK. Now, I’ll go to the MPK’s MIDI track and add a clip to the first scene. I’ll make the clip super short, turn off any loop­ing, and change the launch quan­ti­za­tion to ​“none.” This gives me a clip which will fire instant­ly and hang around just long enough to send out some automation:

Next, I’ll click on the ​“Envelopes” win­dow of the clip view. Clip envelopes are sneak­i­ly pow­er­ful; essen­tial­ly, they allow us to auto­mate almost any­thing con­tained with­in the clip’s track. In our case, I’ll use it to con­trol the Chain Selec­tor. I’ll select my rack, ​“MPK Pre­sets,” in the Device Choos­er, select the Chain Selec­tor, and write the automa­tion by adding a break­point to the red line and mov­ing it to the num­ber ​“1.” It’ll look like this when done:

I’ll do the same two more times, adding a clip and adjust­ing the enve­lope to send the Chain Selec­tor to ​“2” and ​“3,” respec­tive­ly. Final­ly, I’ll adjust the zones in the Instru­ment Rack to match. To tidy things up, I’ll title the clips and the scenes with the appro­pri­ate song names. My fin­ished ses­sion looks some­thing like this:

When I load this ses­sion up at the show, chang­ing key­board sounds will be as easy as fir­ing off a scene for each song.

In the Bank

I use this tech­nique with the Twi­light Hours to assign sounds to the free pads on my SPD-SX. It’s easy to set up, rock-sol­id in use, and, once you get the hang of it, real­ly fast to make changes or add sounds. The best part is, you can save your Rack, with all of its pre­sets, and recall it for any use, with all of your set­tings intact. Cool!

The one draw­back is all of the chains in the Rack are loaded into RAM and ready-to-play. If you have a lot of them (or if they’re par­tic­u­lar­ly resource-inten­sive) you’ll start to see a strain on your CPU. I per­son­al­ly haven’t run into any prob­lems (yet!) but if you do, stay tuned — there’s a bonus post com­ing soon with a solution.

Phew! You and I cov­ered a lot of ground in this one. But, real­ly, this walk-through of Instru­ment Racks is bare­ly scratch­ing the sur­face of what they’re capa­ble of. As you get more com­fort­able with them, and start explor­ing the Chain List a lit­tle more, you’ll find you’ll be able to squeeze as much func­tion­al­i­ty out of your con­trollers as you can muster.

I hope you found this post help­ful! As always, feel free to get in touch if you have ques­tions or sug­ges­tions. My next, and last, entry in this series will detail how I incor­po­rate loops and back­ing tracks into my ses­sions. I’ll see if I can keep the writ­ing and edit­ing process down to less than two years this time.