Ableton Forum

People-

The last few years I have been using external instruments (synths) a lot more than the previous 10. I suspect that is a common situation. Im curious how people are setting up their workflow to handle this.

I am currently using multiple tracks (zero or more for midi clips and one to capture the audio output) for each synth voice. I group the tracks. Its a bit cluttered, and also I dont get the delay compensation that comes with external instruments so I end up having to do some aligning during mixdown.

I generally go through quite a bit of editing of midi and re-tracking of acoustic instruments (mainly bass guitar, vox, sax) as well as re-capture of electronic instruments during the writing process. And I still use some soft synths occasionally.

I have looked at using external instruments, and occasionally done so, but this becomes complex as to get at the waveform I need to freeze, copy, then flatten (or at least I think I do) and it becomes easy to lose track of what midi corresponds to what audio. Ableton doesnt seem to have the ability to 'save the midi and the audio together' that I know of.

So I'm not asking "how should I do this"... I'd like to ask this community "How do _you_ deal with this"?

Hi,

This is soo funny I have been thinking about this alot lately as well. I am using alot of external instruments as well and at first I thought it was cool to just create a group which contained a midi and audio track. I would then add this to my default template, but wow after adding 8-9 of those that makes for a big song default template. I don't know why I didn't just think about this until recently, but you can create a folder in the browser and drag a copy of your group to it. That will copy the midi and audio track both grouped. This allows me to now have a clean default template on load and now I can just drag and drop the group over from my folder I named external gear. Now it's much easier and cleaner to use external gear with my setup. I hope that helps......

One issue I have run across you can't add a group that contains a cvtools plugin. This will cause the group to be corrupted for some weird reason.