Ableton Live Audio Racks Tutorial

I wrote this tutorial because Racks (which were added in Live 6) are one of Live's most versatile and unique features. Even though there's a whole chapter dedicated to them in the Live manual, Racks can be a little abstract if you don't go in with some idea of their usefulness and flexability. This tutorial assumes some basic familiarity with Live -- if you're new to the program you should at the very least work through the lessons packaged with Live before reading any further.

There are three types of Rack effects -- Audio Effect Racks (which I'm going to talk about in this tutorial), MIDI Effect Racks (which I will probably talk about next time) and Drum Racks (which you can read about in the Live manual).

For our sample project, we're going to build a simple little sweepable multiband EQ filter, like the sort commonly found on DJ mixers. To get started, go into Clip mode and create a new Live project with a single audio track. Find a simple little drum loop and drop it into a clip slot so you have an audio source to work with. Go to the Live Device Browser and drag an Audio Effect Rack into the effect bin for the track.

The blank Audio Effect Rack doesn't look very exciting. There's just an empty space that reads “Drop Audio Effects Here”, and three buttons on the left (Show/Hide Macro Controls, Show/Hide Chain List, Show/Hide Devices). Click the "Show/Hide Chain List" button to get started.

There are now two sub-windows which say “Drop Audio Effects Here”, the left one is where we will create the individual chains, the one on the right shows the effects bin for the currently selected chain (once we create it). Also note the two “Chain” and “Hide” buttons in the upper right corner, we will be using those in a moment.

What exactly is a chain? It's basically a branching sub-path of effects -- when a signal enters the Effect Rack, you can selectively decide which chain (or chains) it will be processed by. It's a conditional selection, like an “if” statement in a programming language. The branching is decided by a “Chain Selector” parameter which we will set up later -- the Chain Selector is basically an automatable “knob” that can be mapped to a hardware controller, assigned an automation envelope, etc. Don't worry if some of this sounds a little confusing, all will become clear shortly.

Now let's make some chains. Right click in the Chain List sub-window and select “Create Chain” from the (single-item) pop-up menu. Do this twice more so you see three chains listed. These chains are going to be for the low, mid, and high ranges of our multiband filter, so go ahead and rename the chains (right click on the chain name) to “Low”, “Mid”, and “High”. It's always easier to keep track of things when they're well-labeled, especially when a project gets more complicated or you haven't looked at it for a while.

Click the Chain Select Editor button (the grey button up top, next to “Hide”), and the display will expand to show the Chain Zone Editor. If you've ever used a zone editor in a sampler, this will probably look familiar. Each chain's lane has a horizontal bar that you can drag to select what range the chain is going to be active within. These selector bars are tucked away on the left side of the editor, they are a little hard to see initially, but you can right click and select “Distribute Ranges Equally” to make them more visible and adjust from there. Let's tweak that a little bit so that there's some overlap between zones, so that you end up with something that looks like this:

Now to set up the Chain Selector. Right click anywhere in the range of numbers at the top of the zone editor (the part that looks like a ruler) and select “Map to Macro 1”. Then click the small round “Show/Hide Macro Controls” button on the left of the Audio Effect Rack (it's just to the left of the grey “Auto” button).

The macro control panel consists of eight assignable knobs which can be mapped to any parameter within the rack (you can even map multiple parameters to one knob). Currently, all of the knobs are greyed out except for knob #1, since we've already assigned it to the Chain Selector. If you move the knob, you will be able to see the red line move back and forth over the “ruler” at the top of the Zone Editor to the right. If you have a hardware MIDI controller, now would be a good time to assign the macro control to a knob or fader.

Now, the only thing left to do is add some effects. Click on the Low chain in the Chain List so that it is highlighted. Go to the Device Browser and drag an EQ Three effect into the “Devices” area on the right side of the Rack window (make sure you put it inside the rack). On the EQ Three, turn the GainLow knob all the way to max and turn GainMid and GainHi all the way down.

Repeat the process for the other two chains. Click on the Mid chain in the Chain List and you will see it has an effects bin of its very own. Drop an EQ Three effect in here, turn GainMid all the way up and turn GainLow and GainHi all the way down. Click on the High chain, drop an EQ Three in that chain's effects bin, turn up GainHi and turn down GainLow and GainMid.

Now it's time to check out the results. Start playing a clip and move the Macro 1 knob back and forth and you should hear something approximating an EQ “sweep”. Of course this is a pretty basic proof of concept but hopefully you should see how all of the pieces fit together, and already have some ideas of your own.

DOWNLOAD THE SAMPLE PROJECT HERE (created in Live 7)

To test your rack skills, here are some other things to try:

Hopefully by now you will know your way around well enough to build some things from scratch, and also to examine and reverse engineer some of the many Rack presets that come with Live. The official Ableton Live forums also are a good source of information about Racks. And don't forget the manual!

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