Ableton Forum

Hi all,

I would like to be able to create 5-6 different VSTi tracks and then control them all via different chains from a track with an Instrument Rack that communicates with the VSTi tracks via several "External Instrument" plugins. The reason is that I, as a keyboard player in a rock band, have say 4-5 different sounds but in some tunes I need them splitted over the keyboard in different ways. Instead of having the same sounds/VSTi loaded on many channels I thought that I could switch settings simply by having different Rack chains controlling the tracks. I normally do this in my studio but it only seems to work with Native Instruments Battery 3. Is there any workaround?

instead of using different tracks+rack+'external instruments'+routing...
wouldn't it be better to just put the actual vstis inside a custom built rack? on 1 track (fold-able)?
seeing as racks have an internal 'mixer' for the chains...
and are designed to do exactly what you need..(that is keyboard splits etc..)
and less clutter/unnecessary routing...

btw the external instrument device works for vsts with more than 1 stereo output...

cheers

That works quite well and that is how I've been managing this so far. Just had second thoughts and started worrying that it might be a waste of resources of having pretty much the same sample patches loaded on five different channels. Or is Sampler/Simpler that clever that it figures this out and doesn't double load the samples into RAM? The thing is that I need to have the same sounds but different splits for different songs. Say: Song one: Only piano Song two: Piano and xylophone split, song three: Piano and strings layered and split with square wave... etc etc.

Cheers/