Pre Fader sends not working as expected.

[somaaudio]

Hi,

I´m trying to create a headphone mix for a singer, and would like to be able to mute one or more tracks from my control room mix, but not from the singers headphones mix. I have created a return track in pre fader mode and assigned all the tracks via the send to that return track, but when i mute a track ( with the track activator button ) the signal gets muted from the headphones mix too. Is this normal in Live or am i missing something?
Thanks for any help.

[dorsia]

hey mate,

after testing this, i'm not sure you can make the sends pre-fader.
what i mean is, you can make the send channels themselves pre fader, but not the actual sends.

i think the only way to achieve what you want is to make the send channel pre, and lower the actual original track volume down - that way the send still goes through as the track is still technically "active".

hope this helps.

[timday]

The "mute" button is a track deactivator and turns off everything including the sends - it isn't the same as a mute for the main fader. It's a reasonably good behaviour in most circumstances because if you want to mute a track you usually also want it muted in say a reverb bus. In your case it isn't what you want but you could set the output of the tracks you want muted to "sends only" maybe.

[somaaudio]

Ok guys thanks for your help. But in the manual page 218 they say " every return track has a Pre/Post toggle, that determines if the signal a clip track sends to it is tapped before or after the mixer stage ( i.e., the pan, volume and track activate controls )"....
So i thought this should work.
Thanks again!

[chrk]

...So i thought this should work. ....

I'd have thought so, too.

Maybe Ableton have changed this behaviour at one point and forgotten to update the manual accordingly. You should ask support@ableton.com.

In the meantime, timday is right, setting the output of those tracks to "sends only" gets you where you want to be with your aux mixes, and when you set them back to pre fader, you'll even be able to level them out against the other tracks for your singer.

[somaaudio]

Thanks chrk will contact support.
Regards,

[fishmonkey]

it would be good if the Abes provided more comprehensive pre options for return tracks. however, given that there is currently only one option, it does make the most sense for that to be post-mixer (clearly the manual is wrong now).

Live gives you more tap options if you are routing from one normal channel to another, so you can work around the return track pre limitation, however it involves creating a shadow channel for each channel that you want to route to the musician's mixes.

for example, if you have a guitar channel, you create a second channel that takes its input from the guitar channel, and choose pre-fx or post-fx as the tap point. you can then use this channel to feed your mix sends, and you would make this shadow channel sends-only. now when you mute the original channel your monitor mixes won't be affected...