Ableton Forum

Hey - I'm building a live set in Session View with the following components:

1. Backing audio track, broken up by song, one song per scene. Tempo set on launch for each scene. No problems here.

2. Click track for drummer, one tempo per song / scene. No problems here.

3. MIDI patch changes sent to external hardware synths - many changes per song / scene. This was tricky because Ableton Live requires separate MIDI clips for each Bank/Program select, but I've figured out how to handle this by converting program changes to Note Numbers using MIDI Pipe in order to consolidate all changes into one MIDI clip.

4. Effects processing for external hardware synths. This I can't seem to figure out at all. I have one armed audio track, and I can easily monitor the input and hear that the external keyboard is being effected by the plugins - so the routing is all working. But what I need is for each Scene to launch different effects presets - each song needs to have its own keyboard effects ready to go. For example some songs need 1/8th note delay, some need 1/4, some need 50% wet mix, some need only 20%. I don't want to touch anything - is there any way for effects presets on an armed audio track to change automatically upon scene launch?

Thanks a lot for any assistance!

This seems like a perfect application for MIDI ghost clips. If you search the forum I think you'll find plenty of examples of how to use those. Here's how I see that applying to your problem:

* Each song has it's own scene. Each scene has a MIDI ghost clip.
* Each of these MIDI ghost clips have different automation parameters. Say, for instance, that you have a simple delay of 100ms on one song and need that to be 300ms on another song. By editing each MIDI clip individually, you can modify those automations to your different FX as need be.

Optional suggestions:

* Group your FX for each song into it's own Audio Effect Rack
* Group all of these new FX racks into another Audio Effect Rack
* Map the Chain selector for the Audio Effect Rack to a macro control. The benefit being that you now have one spot where you can change your FX. There's all sorts of control you have here - it makes it easy to blend your FX. Arranging your chains correctly (from 0 to N instead of 0-127) can also make things more intuitive. If you have 8 songs, you can arrange these chains so that your macro knob simply maps 1-8.

Set up an Effect Rack and create a chain for each of your Songs / Scenes. You then need to set up the chain selector so that only one chain is active at a time. You can then add an empty clip into each scene that has an envelope defined for the Effect Rack's chain selector (obviously selecting the correct effect chain for the scene).