Ext. Instruments in Drum Racks

[Chris Thompson]

Hey everyone,

I set up a drum rack with over 70 chains, each triggering a separate MIDI note, and each using its own "external instrument" to send that MIDI note to Kontakt (VST), on another track. Now that it is done, I want to save it and be able to call the whole thing up as a preset quickly at any time.

However, if I call up the drum rack later from my library, all the external instruments come up with the "midi to" and "audio from" boxes empty. I have to go back in one by one to choose the Kontakt instrument in the "Midi To" and "Audio From" boxes for every single chain's external instrument.

Is there a way to save the association of external instrument to VST plugin somehow,

OR

is there a way to at least change the "Midi To" and "Audio From" settings for many different chains' external instruments at once (then I could just select them all and relink to Kontakt quickly)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated

Chris

[filterstein]

As far as i know the external instrument is designed to use with midi hardware stuff, i cannot imagine why you would need it for a vst.

[Chris Thompson]

As far as i know the external instrument is designed to use with midi hardware stuff, i cannot imagine why you would need it for a vst.

because I want to map the samples on a vst instrument to the keyboard in the midi editor in Live. I have about 25 Kontakt patches that each have about 70 different samples mapped across the keyboard. I want to use the drum rack device so that I can see the names of the samples for each midi note mapped in the midi editor, not just "G#"

[Chris Thompson]

As far as i know the external instrument is designed to use with midi hardware stuff, i cannot imagine why you would need it for a vst.

also, per the ableton manual, the external instrument device is to be used any one of three ways: the way you describe (to external midi devices), what I'm looking to do (to a multitimbral vst plugin), or to rewire slave instruments (for example, reason).

It seems like ableton made it possible but didn't make a way to save the work once its set up for quick access later.

[speak_onion]

When I save a rack that includes an Ext. Effect or Ext. Instrument it always comes back with the routing as I saved it, unless I've changed the output/input/midi config. Not sure why it's not working for you. Although, I've never done it in a drum rack.

[zalo]

instead of using a drum rack, use a midi effect rack

make a chain for each sample, name it and reduce it to the 1 note

right click on the chains and click on show names in key roll or something

now when you fold you will see all the names, no need to put external instruments at all

[Chris Thompson]

instead of using a drum rack, use a midi effect rack

make a chain for each sample, name it and reduce it to the 1 note

right click on the chains and click on show names in key roll or something

now when you fold you will see all the names, no need to put external instruments at all

Thank you so much! This is exactly what I wanted to do but didn't know about the MIDI effect rack device.

So now, if I want to process the different channels of Kontakt separately, do I need to add an external instrument device after the Midi effect rack?

[zalo]

So now, if I want to process the different channels of Kontakt separately, do I need to add an external instrument device after the Midi effect rack?

i dont know kontakt but if you mean send it on different midi channels, like c1-c2 is midi 1 and d2-c3 is midi 2

then create an instrument rack and put in how many different channels you want to send on

if you mean you want each note to have separate audio tracks, then im not quite sure how kontakt routes audio so i couldnt really help