Newbie Question: Send / Return Chains in racks

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otalgia99
Posts: 111
Joined: Sun Feb 19, 2017 4:21 am

Newbie Question: Send / Return Chains in racks

Post by otalgia99 » Fri Oct 15, 2021 2:25 pm

Hello everyone

I noticed that Drum Racks offer send / return chains, but instrument racks do not.

I would very much like to know why that is -- I'm sure there's a very reasonable reason for it, I just can't work out for myself what it is!

All the best,
O99
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craigc
Posts: 22
Joined: Wed Apr 08, 2020 4:44 pm

Re: Newbie Question: Send / Return Chains in racks

Post by craigc » Fri Oct 15, 2021 11:14 pm

what is a send / return "chain" ?

pottering
Posts: 1800
Joined: Sat Dec 06, 2014 4:41 am

Re: Newbie Question: Send / Return Chains in racks

Post by pottering » Sat Oct 16, 2021 3:42 am

craigc wrote:
Fri Oct 15, 2021 11:14 pm
what is a send / return "chain" ?
https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/instr ... drum-racks

With Drum Racks it is common to have dozens of Chains (which also are in a specific order, following MIDI standard), most presets have 16/32 or more pads, and "Slice To" options creates a lot automatically too, so it is very common you may have FX routing you want to achieve that was not planned for when the Rack with dozens of Chains was created.

While with Instrument Racks, they usually have few Chains, and most of the time you are building one yourself, so any weird FX routing can be created with the Rack, and it is not hard to route FX in already created Instrument Racks with the normal way of loading FX (you can group Chains and load Racks within Racks).
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otalgia99
Posts: 111
Joined: Sun Feb 19, 2017 4:21 am

Re: Newbie Question: Send / Return Chains in racks

Post by otalgia99 » Sat Oct 16, 2021 8:53 am

pottering wrote:
Sat Oct 16, 2021 3:42 am

With Drum Racks it is common to have dozens of Chains (which also are in a specific order, following MIDI standard), most presets have 16/32 or more pads, and "Slice To" options creates a lot automatically too, so it is very common you may have FX routing you want to achieve that was not planned for when the Rack with dozens of Chains was created.

While with Instrument Racks, they usually have few Chains, and most of the time you are building one yourself, so any weird FX routing can be created with the Rack, and it is not hard to route FX in already created Instrument Racks with the normal way of loading FX (you can group Chains and load Racks within Racks).
Thank you, Pottering!

The way you have described it makes complete sense to me now. In a drum rack that could have 30-plus chains, it's much more streamlined to put the most global effects -- or at least those applied to groups of instruments, perhaps -- on send / returns.

And now I can see why some of the drum racks I have assembled got very processor-hungry. I was putting effects on lots of individual chains, which of course one can also do but that really stacks up demand very quickly.

Instantiating effects "per-chain" might still be worth it in certain cases, but wherever an effect can be applied more generally in a drum rack, it's better off on one of the rack's aux buses. Makes it easier to assign overall control of that effect to a macro as well.

Thank you for explaining it!
O99
Perform. rig
MacBook Pro 2015 | OS 12.6 | 2.8 GHz Quad Intel i7 | 16Gb RAM | 4 Tb External HDD (USB3) | MicroBook IIc | Akai APC40 MkII | LIVE 11 Suite

Prod. rig
Mac Studio M1 Max | OS 13.2.1 | 64 Gb RAM | MiniStack STX | ApolloX6 | Live 11 Suite

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