Ableton Forum

Here's my situation. I want to run four channels of instruments (Stick,
cello, and electric upright) into Live. No problem. What I'd like to do, for
any or all of those channels, at any given time, is to switch the Audio To
routing from Master to Ext Out, so as to route the signal to an external
effect, and then back into a separate channel.

I've figured out how to make this work, if I just reach over and switch
the routing using the mouse, but ideally I'd like to either control the
routing change via MIDI or a keystroke. (One event to select the track,
and a second event to change the routing, would seem to be the steps to
do it). I've looked at the section of the manual about MIDI and Remote
control, but there's no answer that applies to the output routing. So, I
bring the question here...

Is this possible? One thing that occurs to me just now is that I could do it
by saving each routing combination as a separate set, and then just open
a different Set depending on the routing I need, but I wonder if that would
then require that I change effects presets for every Set.

Even if it's not possible to directly control the routing via MIDI or
keystrokes, Live has already answered so many questions for me
regarding "virtual racks" that I'm really impressed with it.

Thanks for your help.

- jimbugtm

Well, it certainly won't be the first time I've answered my own question
(with the help of a collaborator)...

So, if anyone else is interested, here's how we figured it out:

1. For each track that I want to send through the external effect (a Mesa
V-Twin, in case anyone was wondering), make a clone, with the same
input.
2. Route the clone's output to the input of the V-Twin (on the MOTU
828MkII, for every input there's an output, so this is pretty straight-
forward).
3. Then, create a track whose input is the output of the V-Twin.
4. To route each channel through the effect (or to bypass), map a key to
each track's Activation icon.
5. The way to get around having to have multiple instances of plug-in
effects is to create as many returns as needed, each with its own FX
loop.
6. If you want to make sure that the V-Twin (and whatever instrument
that goes through it) is the first thing in an effects chain, turn down the
sends on the individual tracks, and turn up the sends on the V-Twin
track.

For two tracks, each with a clone going through the V-Twin, and two sends,
each with two plug-ins, the CPU load was about 30% max (it probably
would have been less if I would have been running in a hardware profile
that was not 'Net- and AntiVirus-enabled, but this was meant to be a quick
test anyway).

Other programs that I've tried don't have this flexibility.

Hi Jim! Nice to see another Stick player/Abletonist here!

So, Stickista, are you using Live as a Live V-Rack?
If so, how do you like it?

Hi!

I use Ableton Live for looping my Stick on the fly, playing drum loops and back vocals and processing my Stick with some VST effects . I find looping on the fly very convenient with Live, mostly because of its quantization possibilities (you can press the pedal of the midi foot controller at any time to start/stop recording if you set quantization on 1 bar, for example) , and also because of the great number of tracks I can loop.

I'm not a great Ableton Live expert, but by now, everything has worked really well for me with looping on the fly with Live.