Instrument Rack and Macro Automation Weirdness

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Codevyper
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Feb 07, 2020 1:53 am

Instrument Rack and Macro Automation Weirdness

Post by Codevyper » Mon May 16, 2022 6:33 am

Hello Community,

I’m working on some backing track for my band and I have been dealing with something weird that I cannot figure out. I’m on Ableton Suite 11 for OSX. In arrangement view I have a midi track. That track contains an Instrument rack. Macro 1 in that rack is my chain selector for the instrument rack. Inside that instrument rack are sub-instrument racks that contain 1 VST and some audio effects. Each sub-rack has the device on mapped to the chain selector value in the parent instrument rack such that only one rack is enabled at a time.

I just added another rack to the parent rack, mapped the selector value and it all works as expected. The issues is when I play that portion of the set, the sub-rack enables for the first bar of the song, then disables automatically, despite the fact that I can see the automation lane for the parent rack and the value is correct. I’ve looked for any other envelopes or automation in that track that may be disabling the instrument rack at that point but there is none. Has anyone ever experienced this? What should I be looking for? Worth noting that I have 4 other songs earlier in this set in arrangement view and they’re all working the same way but I don’t have the issue with them.

Thanks in advance for any insight

Codevyper
Posts: 4
Joined: Fri Feb 07, 2020 1:53 am

Re: Instrument Rack and Macro Automation Weirdness

Post by Codevyper » Wed May 18, 2022 5:53 am

Okay.. for anyone else that comes across this, I figured it out. I have automation that is bound to the chain selector of the instrument rack. Each time I need to move to the next sub instrument rack in the parent rack I increment the value of the chain selector by 1. The issue I had was that the automation would move for example from 3 to 4, but further in the set the value went back to 3 so the automation was sloping back down to a value of 3 in the lane. Once I found the data point on the automation line and removed it, the desired instrument rack stayed active.

If you don’t need to chain select too much in a given rack, I recommend incrementing the Chan selector in increments of 5 instead of 1. That way it’s easier to follow the automation of the chain selector vs the way I did it by incrementing by a value of 1 each time.

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