Ableton Forum

A lot of you are excited about the use of racks and im not feeling the love here on this new feature of live.
Can someone take the time to try and turn me on to these racks. Why , how can racks make my studio life easier. I have never been one for saving effect or processor presets and thats all I see it useful for but im sure theres more to it than that.
What makes you excited about racks?
'

Firstly, massive drum kits using multiple Impulses [OR SIMPLERS]
Depending on how you construct these drum kits, you can layer multiple drum hits for one midi note, and put seperate effects on different drum sounds [for example: some reverb on the snare], without having to use complex track routing [which takes up mixer space]

Secondly, sound design.
One tip you read time and time again for improving your sound is LAYERING INSTRUMENTS.
This was already possible by doubling up midi clips on different tracks with different instruments, but now I can have one rack produce the sound of many instances of Simpler, or even third party VSTs.

Furthermore I can use velocity layers to create extremely expressive instruments, be they drums, keyboards or whatever. One can also do split keyboards, particulary handy for performance.

One rack can contain a massive modular environment with few limitations. I suspect when people start sharing their favourite custom made racks we will start seeing some very powerful instruments.

womoma wrote:Firstly, massive drum kits using multiple Impulses [OR SIMPLERS]
Depending on how you construct these drum kits, you can layer multiple drum hits for one midi note, and put seperate effects on different drum sounds [for example: some reverb on the snare], without having to use complex track routing [which takes up mixer space]

Secondly, sound design.
One tip you read time and time again for improving your sound is LAYERING INSTRUMENTS.
This was already possible by doubling up midi clips on different tracks with different instruments, but now I can have one rack produce the sound of many instances of Simpler, or even third party VSTs.

Furthermore I can use velocity layers to create extremely expressive instruments, be they drums, keyboards or whatever. One can also do split keyboards, particulary handy for performance.

One rack can contain a massive modular environment with few limitations. I suspect when people start sharing their favourite custom made racks we will start seeing some very powerful instruments.

Im interested in what you were saying about massive drums. So I can set up multiple impulses to give me more than eight cells, is that right? or do you mean i can only layer drums extra sounds on an instance of impulse still limited by the eight cells.
At this moment I havent even worked out how to construct a rack. I think this is something I really need to look at the manual.

The possibility's are limitless.
Check out the covops site for a 128 slot drum rack made out of 16 simplers...

They're like Korg's Legacy Cel on steroids

what about using racks with no vsts, and no operator/sampler ?

is it still the shitbomb-banana ?

You can build a rack that contains all of your favourite simpler presets, each sound in a different simpler. Then you use the chainselector to switch between the different presets. Could be handy for live-gigs, because that way you don't need to load new simplerpresets, or switch between loads of simpler channels during your performance. You just turn a knob for the different sounds.

Download the sampler-rack from the covertoperators, then you will see what I mean.

i set up a rack with 26 operators, each one exactly the same, more or less just the initial setting, EXCEPT, each of the 26 operators has a different wave-form (sine, sine A, sine B, ..., sqD, etc.)

if I strike a key, all operators play at once, and I get a CPU overload.

now, the magic of live and operator's integration:
i changed the velocity map of the rack so that each of the 26 waveforms plays at a different velocity.
if I strike hard, I will hear a saw. if I play soft i will hear a sine.
just to smooth it out, I used the velocity "fade". sometimes, depending on the velocity, i will hear a mix of waveforms.
put a random velocity plugin there and you're laughing

the point of all this: still 26 operators, but now, live is smart about the cpu. in fact the cpu always looks like i'm playing one operator.
that's fucking rad.

b0unce wrote:what about using racks with no vsts, and no operator/sampler ?

is it still the shitbomb-banana ?

Yup, you can do sweet stuff with midi, simpler and impulse.

goodie....hmmm, ya, racks and arps and note lengths....that kind of thang ?

b0unce wrote:goodie....hmmm, ya, racks and arps and note lengths....that kind of thang ?

Yeah. Stacking arps and various other effects in parallel instead of linear...
Pure fun (imo)

(velocity) crossfade from one chain to the other..

It's basically an elegant solution to not having program changes..
(Though i still want those too)

kool, controlable chaos.

I need a comprehensive multisampler tho, and then I'm covered

im going to need to investigate this because right now Im still not getting it. thanks for taking the time to tell me of your excitement expect further questions in the near future

something alot of rack lovers overlook is the fact that you can link device on off to macro controls which means you can now automate device on/off in session view. you can also link the repeat button on beatrepeat which means you can now automate that in session view as well.

by linking device on/off of many devices to many macros you can automate them on and off and in effect be creating a "program change" during a session which is handy. one operator goes off and another one goes on. yay.

hoffman2k wrote:The possibility's are limitless.
Check out the covops site for a 128 slot drum rack made out of 16 simplers...

can you explain a little how the note namer works? can't get it to display custom names.