Ableton Forum

I spent the day hacking on Instrument Racks in Live 6, and I wound up with several interesting racks.

The most interesting of them uses the low fifth C1-G1 to keyswitch between eight different rhythmic patterns. Each note of the keyswitch zone represents a different pattern, and if you depress one of these keys, any notes that you are playing with your right hand will be repeated rhythmically using that pattern. If you don't depress any of the keyswitch notes, other notes that you play will be unaffected. Its not perfect, but it is a pretty good example of the kinds of things that you can do in an instrument rack.

A second rack does a 3-way split based on the MIDI random device, enabling randomized arp patterns. (The 3-way splitter could be a general purpose device for anyone who wants to randomize things.)

If I get the time, I could do a keyswitching tutorial. Anyone interested?

Also, I'd like to get a couple of "testers" to make sure that the project works on someone else's rig. Anyone who might have a few minutes to DL and try it, drop me a PM and I'll reply with a temporary URL.

Also, if there any any Ableton devs out there who are interested, I have a bunch of feedback as a result of this exercise. Racks are cool, but they could be cooler still. In addition, a midi trigger device, changeable/mappable notes in the scale device, and other things along these lines would be helpful. But these should go in a post in the wishlist forum, I suppose...

Really interested in what you describe. I tried doing something along those lines using the rack but did get anywhere. Would love to see a tutorial.

Pm sent.

So you're mapping the lower octave of your kb to a track that midi outputs to your instrument?

Good idea!

Another way is to make midi clips that do many things & assign certain keys to those.

Mucho fun!

Hey Kodama - thanks for the ideas.

MIDI clips are definitely a good thing to trigger with this kind of setup. One cool thing about the new zones stuff is that the lower notes can trigger the arp rhythms while remaining "unheard", and that this control mapping is independant from the MIDI mappings for your set.

Built this way, keymapping comes as part of the rack component, rather than as something that you need to set up separately. Plus, you don't have to build special clips for use in conjunction with it!!! Clips are a fantastic feature, but they are not great for building self-contained instruments.

I think that a lot of people think of zones as just something that you use for multilayered sampling. This shows how to do control tasks with them, without resorting to trigger clips. You can then just drag the rack into a set live, and keep playing!

-- z

Kodama wrote:So you're mapping the lower octave of your kb to a track that midi outputs to your instrument?

Good idea!

Another way is to make midi clips that do many things & assign certain keys to those.

Mucho fun!