Drum Rack How to make Compressor affect all pads?

[TomViolenz]

Quite a newb question methinks, but I can't figure it out.
I have loaded a drum rack with 16 Samplers (which are contained in instrument racks) on 16 pads. The macros of the 16 Sampler-InstrumentRacks house the controls for the individual drum sounds. Now I want to add a Compressor to the DrumRack to affect all 16 drum sounds together and I want to house the controls of the Compressor in the macro section of the drum rack.
But I don't get it to work. There seems to be no place where I can insert the Compressor after all 16 pads, but within the rack.
I can of course house it outside of it, but then I can't assign its controls to the DrumRacks macro section...
What am I missing?

[timday]

I think the normal way would be to drop the drum rack and the compressor in another drum rack and use its macros. You can nest racks pretty much indefinitely. If you drop a drum rack inside another drum rack the pads map across automatically and the original drum rack appears as a chain which you can then put the compressor on.



So here I've draggeed "16 Snares" from the library (just as an example) into another drum rack. As you can hopefully see the pads have mapped across and the original pads from 16 snares have vanished (this behaviour is changed from 8 I think where the pads would still be there but the I/O would change). The original 16 snares rack is left as a kind of sub drum rack without pads but still with all its original chains in it. You can apply a compressor across the original 16 snares rack but still keep it inside the new drum rack as I have done here.

Like a lot of Ableton stuff, this is a lot less confusing to do than it is to talk about.

[TomViolenz]

I had actually found that solution, but had thought that can't be necessary. It just seems like there has to be a place within the first DrumRack to affect all pads. That's what the DrumRack macros are for. I thought.
The reason why I'm a little insistant here, is that I think with Push you can only go 2 racks deep (correct me if I'm wrong), and I wanted to prepare all my drums to be used (and step sequenced, yeah! ) for my imminent purchase of Push.
So, two levels deep would be the DrumRack Macros and the Sampler-InstrumentRack macros.

[Galt]

Dump the compressor after the drum rack and rack the drum rack and compressor. Easy.

I'm now going to try to wrestle a bottle of single malt irish whisky off a horny Irishman. Damn Friday nights.

[regretfullySaid]

Consider routing the track your drums are on to another track, and stick the compressor on the track receiving the drums. You could call it 'Drum Bus'. It's what I do, anyway.

[TomViolenz]

Dump the compressor after the drum rack and rack the drum rack and compressor. Easy.

I'm now going to try to wrestle a bottle of single malt irish whisky off a horny Irishman. Damn Friday nights.

That's the suggestion timday made.
My problem is that it adds another layer to the rack and I have heard, (but not verified) that with Push you can't reach the third macro level.
Which would make the whole DrumRack I make pretty useless, because I will then lose the ability to edit my individual drum hits.

I thought about adding the Compressor as a drumrack send, but it seems you can't set the drumrack chains to go to sends only, like you can with normal tracks. And the "Audio to" field of the drum pad chains is blanked out for some reason. (can I activate that field somehow?)


Oh, and you and a horny Irishmen heh?! Never figured you the type... have fun you two

[TomViolenz]

Consider routing the track your drums are on to another track, and stick the compressor on the track receiving the drums. You could call it 'Drum Bus'. It's what I do, anyway.

That's what I normaly do, but I would like to make my drumracks self contained and a one stop affair to load/save/edit.
In your suggested scenario, I would have to change the track on Push everytime I want to adjust the Compressor settings effecting the drumset I'm working on. That's not conveniant.
A little better (and I'm leaning this way at the moment, if no one has a better idea or confirms that you can go three levels deep on Push), is to just put the compressor after the drum rack in its own rack. The self contained unit would then be the whole track instead of a neat DrumRack, but I guess I would survive...

[Galt]

Dump the compressor after the drum rack and rack the drum rack and compressor. Easy.

I'm now going to try to wrestle a bottle of single malt irish whisky off a horny Irishman. Damn Friday nights.

That's the suggestion timday made.
My problem is that it adds another layer to the rack and I have heard, (but not verified) that with Push you can't reach the third macro level.
Which would make the whole DrumRack I make pretty useless, because I will then lose the ability to edit my individual drum hits.

I thought about adding the Compressor as a drumrack send, but it seems you can't set the drumrack chains to go to sends only, like you can with normal tracks. And the "Audio to" field of the drum pad chains is blanked out for some reason. (can I activate that field somehow?)


Oh, and you and a horny Irishmen heh?! Never figured you the type... have fun you two

To get the tracks to go to sends only –> SOLO the returns.

(I think. Hung over here)

[TomViolenz]

Dump the compressor after the drum rack and rack the drum rack and compressor. Easy.

I'm now going to try to wrestle a bottle of single malt irish whisky off a horny Irishman. Damn Friday nights.

That's the suggestion timday made.
My problem is that it adds another layer to the rack and I have heard, (but not verified) that with Push you can't reach the third macro level.
Which would make the whole DrumRack I make pretty useless, because I will then lose the ability to edit my individual drum hits.

I thought about adding the Compressor as a drumrack send, but it seems you can't set the drumrack chains to go to sends only, like you can with normal tracks. And the "Audio to" field of the drum pad chains is blanked out for some reason. (can I activate that field somehow?)


Oh, and you and a horny Irishmen heh?! Never figured you the type... have fun you two

To get the tracks to go to sends only –> SOLO the returns.

(I think. Hung over here)

F**k, that did it!

I owe you some Malt liquor methinks

[Galt]

F**k, that did it!

I owe you some Malt liquor methinks

Great! I'm PM you my address. FYI, I'm partial to Talisker!

[silversurfer60]

In your drumrack, under your list of drum chains, create a return chain, you have to activate the view with the buttons on the left down side of the rack. Then put no fx inside this return chain, but choose on the right side, where Rack Output is, a normal return track of your live set, you will see them, when you open this menue. Then you can use a compressor in a normal return track or every other return track of your set.

Of course you have to set the volume of send A (this will be the name of your return chain in your drumrack) in all your drum chains in the drum rack to 0,0db, so that the signal can go to the return chain and through to your return chain outside the drumrack, where your compressor is.

[TomViolenz]

In your drumrack, under your list of drum chains, create a return chain, you have to activate the view with the buttons on the left down side of the rack. Then put no fx inside this return chain, but choose on the right side, where Rack Output is, a normal return track of your live set, you will see them, when you open this menue. Then you can use a compressor in a normal return track or every other return track of your set.

Of course you have to set the volume of send A (this will be the name of your return chain in your drumrack) in all your drum chains in the drum rack to 0,0db, so that the signal can go to the return chain and through to your return chain outside the drumrack, where your compressor is.

Hey thanks for trying to help, but we already found the solution above.
The goal was to have the compressor in the rack btw, so that I can use the DrumRack macros to control the compressor.

[dr.mysterium]

No solo needed. You can drop samplers into drum racks nested inside drum racks to access these routing functions.
1. Drop the individual Samplers into their own Drum Rack
2. AND drop those 16 Racked Samplers into the main Drum Rack
3. and THEN set the output of each nested Rack holding each Sampler to send to the Return that your creating in the main Drum Rack to hold this Compressor.

Soloing sends affect using other sends for other purposes and isolating other cells for any other purpose.

Building drum racks defined by the limitations of 'Push' seems counter intuitive compared with building the best rack for your needs (flow, recall, control, routing, etc.)

Dr.M's HOW TO Build Ultimate Drum Rack w/ Kit Snap, Blue Hand, & Live Sample Select
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=200085

[TomViolenz]

Building drum racks defined by the limitations of 'Push' seems counter intuitive compared with building the best rack for your needs (flow, recall, control, routing, etc.)

Well, for my case this sentence is a contradiction. Building a drum rack within the limitations of Push IS what I do for my needed workflow! Which will be: Do everything from Push lightning fast without ever touching the mouse or looking at the monitor.
I have 16 Samplers with 128 samples each. Each of the Sampler/Instrument racks has the same parameters assigned to macros, the Sample Selector of course among them. The macro level one higher up, has the compressor controls for the whole drum set and some EQ. It couldn't get easier and more powerful IMO.
Why are people having such a hard time to understand that having ever more options is not always better?!

[Galt]

Why are people having such a hard time to understand that having ever more options is not always better?!

Because you have 2048 samples.